DEGREE OF DISTRESS: Indian graduates hunting for jobs in New York City

On July 1 last year, Deepak Jain took over as dean of the Illinois-based Kellogg’s School of Management. Within a fortnight, he learnt that some of the students hired for top consulting jobs were being asked by their employers to defer joining. Guwahati-born Jain immediately swung into action. He reached out to Kellogg’s well-connected alumni and requested them to come up with six-nine-month long projects so that the graduating students forced to wait out could be productively employed. He followed this up with road shows in the US and in select foreign markets, holding discussions with recruiters. “The number of projects on offer was more than we required,” he recalls.

Dean Jain didn’t act in haste. The summer interns for 2002 (students doing internships in summer 2001 and graduating in 2002) were finding fewer and in some cases no options as the recession deepened in the US. That was radically different from the heady days of the 1990s when most companies grabbed interns and booked them for jobs. If bagging internships is difficult, getting a job offer of choice is tougher in a market that plunged into recession even before it could recover from the dotcom bust.

International students have an additional problem. Having forked out up to $80,000 (Rs 38.4 lakh) for a good MBA course, they face the difficulty of finding an employer willing to justify to the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (ins) its demand for an H-1B work visa. Between October and December 2001, 58,000 H1 visa applications were filed with ins—down 58 per cent as compared to the same period in 2000. Indian students comprise up to 10 per cent of business school students in the US.

Yet, going to the top 10 schools matters more now than ever before. With Ivy League institutions struggling, prospects for students from second and third tier schools are bleaker. Traditionally, 70 per cent of the graduates from business schools opt for jobs in investment banking and consulting because these companies offer faster and better growth opportunities to graduates. But this year consulting giants like Booz Allen & Hamilton Inc and AT Kearney announced cutbacks at the beginning of the recruitment season.

Bhawana Malhotra, a 1993 graduate from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi, moved to Wharton after working with Arthur Andersen and McKinsey in Delhi as a tax and legal expert. Today, she is open to returning to India if the “right offer” comes her way. “Students should factor in the risk of recession. We can face it at any point in our professional lives,” she says.
Dean Jain has taken the challenges of recessionary job market to spell out a future role for management schools. “They should come up with the concept of short-term projects and institutionalise it like a residency programme for doctors. Lets have a business residency programme,” he says.

Though the US economy has begun to show faint signs of recovery, the job market rules may well have changed forever. Unlike the 1990s, students will in future have to rely on networking, career fairs, job postings for summer positions and the alumni.

—Anil Padmanabhan