Many of last year’s graduating economics students did not have jobs lined up after leaving UCLA.
The problem is partly the result of company recruiters not having the resources to reach out to students. Although there are 17 separate business-related groups on campus, company recruiters could not send representatives to all of their events.
This dilemma has led to fewer top businesses coming to recruit undergraduate UCLA students and has also led to low employment rates among graduating economics students, said Andrew Atkeson , the director of the business economics program.
To combat this problem, the Career Center and the economics department formed the UCLA Business Council a year ago. It is designed to bring together the different student groups, said Katrina Davy, career counselor for the economics department.
The initial purpose of the council was to increase cooperation between the student groups as well as to provide a more unified group that businesses can approach when trying to recruit students, said Atkeson.
“Even though the old system might help individual leaders, it was hurting UCLA because employers did not know which groups to approach,” Atkeson said. “Sometimes groups had events, and they were competing against each other for the same employers.”
With greater collaboration between the student groups, the UCLA Business Council now has more resources to host larger events and to bring more prominent names to recruit and give presentations, Davy said.
“Because different groups are involved in different things, a variety of students might end up coming to a club’s event and finding things that they are interested in,” said Jay Chung, president of the Undergraduate Business Society, one of the groups in the council.
Another goal of the business council is to modify the economics curriculum in order to be more practical. This year, they have added three new classes which focus on practical applications of economic theories and on presentations about the student findings, Chung said.
“In those classes, you get judged not only on analytical skills but also on the delivery, and when it comes to getting in front of recruiters, it’s these skills that will help,” Chung added.
For the first time last June, the economics department and the UCLA Career Center conducted a survey of economics students to see how many of them were employed by the time they had graduated.
Of the 96 percent of students who responded, very few students had a post-graduation job offer lined up, Atkeson said. The survey has not yet been analyzed by the Career Center, so statistics are not available yet, Davy said.
“Accounting firms hired a bunch of people, and a few people (went) into banking, but a large majority of the students, even from economics and business economics, are leaving without a job at graduation,” Atkeson said.
According to Atkeson, an underlying problem behind the low recruitment numbers is that students do not really know how to behave in interviews or how to approach job recruiters.
The business council is also planning on running workshops in order to help students prepare for job interviews and to help them focus on what working in the business industry entails, Atkeson said.
“We hear things from recruiters that while our students are smart, they are unprepared to meet employers.”