Despite economy, grad students mastering expectations

HAMPTON

Emmanuel Bridgeforth figured he'd get a job with nearly an $80,000 salary after he graduates from Hampton University with a master's in business administration next spring.

Now he'll be content if it reaches $50,000.

James Young, an MBA student at Old Dominion University, already has a full-time job with an asset management company. Young is happy there, but he no longer has a sense of permanence.

"Your job might go away; you might move," he said before an evening class last week. "In good times, you get fooled into thinking this is forever."

The economic downturn has readjusted expectations for most everyone, including the young adults who hope to enter, and conquer, the business world.

"Normally about this time, there is always anxiety" for prospective MBA graduates, said Sid Howard Credle, the dean of Hampton's business school. "In the past, they may have had three or four offers. The anxiety was about whether I choose this company or that company. This year, the question is: Should I take it now or wait for something better?"

Bridgeforth got his first offer last week. It's a high-profile position these days - bank examiner for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in Washington.

The salary, which he's still negotiating, might not meet his initial expectations, said Bridgeforth, 22, of Augusta, Ga., but the benefits package is "spectacular."

A job as a bank examiner "would be value-added in the current market," he said. "It's work that's really going to affect the economy."

Still, he's going to wait to see the results of a couple of other interviews.

Eleven graduating MBA students - seven enrolled full time in Hampton's five-year bachelor's/ MBA

program and four going part time at ODU while maintaining jobs - radiated a mixture of worry and optimism in recent interviews.

Bryan Campbell, an Old Dominion student who is a senior associate with the accounting firm of Goodman & Co., took a sunny long-term outlook. His firm is "doing well," said Campbell, 24, of Virginia Beach. "Our clients need us a lot more than ever."

He added, "The business environment is cyclical. Right now, we're in a huge trough. At the end of the day, there are going to be some good opportunities. A lot of these things will clear out."

Adrian White is worried, though, about the shrinking opportunities for herself and her peers. With more laid-off professionals on the job market, "I feel like the interviewing process is a lot more competitive than it used to be," said White, 22, of Silver Spring, Md., who plans to graduate from Hampton in May.

Seeing students who received bachelor's degrees last spring still going to career fairs "just makes me even more scared," she said.

White has received an offer for a $37,000-a-year job, but she's hasn't stopped her search: "I'm still nervous because it's not the circumstances I want. It's way below my bottom pay range."

What united almost all of the students was a belief that the master's degree is more valuable than ever.

The team-building approach in class provides an antidote to the behind-closed-doors mentality that has led some companies to ruin, said Sarah Russell, 25, an Old Dominion student from Norfolk.

"This is the best time in the last 20 years to get your MBA," she said. "There's so much going on in the business world to learn from. The teachers seem to be more excited this semester."

And that, many students said, has made classes more intriguing.

In Campbell's global macroeconomics course, "I wouldn't say we totally threw out the textbook," he said. "But we usually start out talking about what was in The Wall Street Journal in the last seven days."

Young, 38, of Norfolk, said: "You get to argue about history while it's being made rather than reading about it 50 years later when everybody has the same narrative."

At Old Dominion, applications to the MBA program have risen 11 percent, from 235 in 2007 to 261 this year, said Bruce Rubin, the program's director. He said it was premature, however, to attribute the increase to the faltering economy.

Hampton and Regent University reported a steady rate of applications, but Credle predicted a boom next year. "When you have those massive layoffs," he said, "that normally provides recruitment potential for many of the business schools. People are looking for a place to retool."

That, in turn, will make it more difficult to get into MBA programs and will provide a "halo effect," adding more luster to the degree, he said.

On the down side, ODU cited a decline in interest from corporate recruiters.

"We haven't seen it shrink significantly, but we are starting to see a downturn," said Penny Pickel, the business school's career management liaison. "Our MBA students are going to have to go to smaller corporate environments and perhaps to government employment to find things they might have found before in large companies."

Hampton, Credle said, has not experienced recruitment declines.

The students differed on issues such as the need for regulation, but they shared a concern that professionals in the financial sector have been unfairly tarred.

"I know the people who worked at these companies," said Ashley Howlett, 22, a Hampton student from Richmond who has worked at Morgan Stanley in New York, PricewaterhouseCoopers in Washington and Ernst & Young in Atlanta.

"Their jobs are in jeopardy," she said. "I don't look at any of them as villains. A lot of them were doing the best they could."

Many also said they have narrowed their career plans to the short term, given the precariousness of the economy. Wherever Bridgeforth lands, he said, "I want to focus solely on my job to make sure I keep it."

Philip Walzer, (757) 222-3864, phil.walzer@pilotonline.com