Hope your Labor Day weekend was a good one. Thanks to my employer, who threw in a bonus day making it a total of 4 days of R&R, I’m back at my desk rested and ready to push through the remaining months of 2011.
Here’s something interesting I came across while perusing the internet and listening to Public Radio.
As the nation’s unemployment numbers continue to show little or no sign of improvement and with the economy on a downward spiral, the prospects of finding a job for graduating college students looks bleak. But there’s one college that’s adopting an innovative approach to help stimulate the job market by offering employers up to $2000 to hire its graduates. The college is the University of Antelope Valley, a private, for-profit institution in Lancaster, California. They’re even offering to pre-screen the candidates, do background checks and narrow down the pool of prospective job applicants to make the selection and hiring process easier for the employer.
I guess one way to look at this is that a lot of companies right now, given the precarious state of the economy, are reluctant to hire any new employees so the offer by this college to pay up to $2000 to have its graduates employed is a helpful nudge in the right direction. If you’ve been following the chatter surrounding the private, for-profit institutions lately, you know that they’ve come under fire because of the promises they’ve made to their students guaranteeing that upon graduation they will secure employment. But when many of their graduating students found that their degrees failed to open any doors and they received little or no support from their alma mater with their employment search, left with mounting student loans, they took their case to the Federal government placing the accreditation status of these institutions under intense scrutiny.
According to a report I heard on American Public Media’s radio program “Market Place,” the founders of this college are working with small companies that need the help of new workers and could use the money. The point is that colleges must train students the skills and knowledge needed for good-paying jobs. Offering $2000 may be enough to get the attention of a prospective employer. Ultimately, the graduate still needs to prove that what he/she has learned is in sync with the needs of their prospective employers.
What do you think about this new approach? What could be the pros and the cons?
The Frustrated Evaluator
www.acei1.com
Quite an interesting concept. I like the creative thinking, but not sure how effective or even enticing a $2000 signing bonus will be. Considering that an annual starting salary for an entry level position will be at least around $25K, and assuming that our hypothetical employer intends to hire the recent graduate for the long-term, such a stimulus should not be a deciding factor to add to the company roster.
I don’t think this initiative will entice employers to hire graduates they weren’t already going to hire. However what it may do is encourage them to hire a student from the University of Antelope Valley over a student from another institution.
Whatever the case, I still commend the university for the idea. Hopefully it helps with their recruiting numbers.