Last week, Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11. AIG received an $85 billion emergency loan the Fed and Bank of America bought out Merrill Lynch. Now the Bush administration is asking Congress for $700 billion to clean up the nation’s financial system.

Things look bad. And in some sectors, they are bad. It’s clear that students graduating this spring are entering a more chaotic job market than their peers who graduated last year.

But students graduating from college in the next few years have one huge force working in their favor: their parents are retiring. The Baby Boomers make up 33 percent of the working population, and according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this demographic is going to begin retiring in 2010. This means that companies are going to have to replenish these previously filled positions, and they’re looking to use college graduates as replacements.

In March, the National Association of Colleges and Employers projected that employers would hire 8 percent more people from the class of 2008 than from the class of 2007.

That’s half of an estimate the group made in fall 2007. What this means is that although there will be an increase in hiring, there will be fewer opportunities available than predicted. Further, there is an increase of degrees awarded from 2007 to 2008, which will add students to the applicant pool, thus increasing the competition of the amount of hiring being done.

Banking on change
Independent investment banks have long lured students with promises of big salaries and big bonuses. But trouble at these firms has forced some of them to sell out to larger, retail banks. It’s not yet clear how that will affect their hiring.

Finance Prof. Robert Dittmar says these jobs aren’t necessarily disappearing, but that the already steep competition is only going to get worse.

“The Wall Street banks will have a much lower appetite for hiring entry-level employees,” Dittmar said. “Because of the economic situation and the turmoil in the markets, the number of those positions is going to be scaled way down.”

The uncertainty surrounding the investment banking industry means that banks that historically hired students as interns are tightening their belts in response to the troubling economic climate.

“Everything is tightening up basically,” Dittmar said. “We’ve come off a fairly rich set of years in which banks have been expanding. Right now we’re having a little bit of a hangover situation and I just think that for recent graduates the job opportunities are going to look a lot worse in the spring of 2009 than they did in the spring of 2008.”

Looking elsewhere
Some students, however, like LSA senior Mitchell Zoerhoff, aren’t worried about the economy’s effects on their job search.

“The Wall Street situation is alarming, yes, but at the same time you can’t live your life worrying you’re going to lose your job just because it happened at another company,” Zoerhoff said.

The economic uncertainty will likely mean more students have to expand their list of target industries to find a job.

Izak Duenyas, a former management professor who currently teaches at the Ross School of Business Executive Education, said flexibility is becoming a more and more important skill. Education, Duenyas said, matters more than ever. It’s just that students entering the job market now are less likely than their parents to spend their entire career doing the same thing.

“The needs of the economy change all the time, so the importance of flexibility and the renewal of your skills is important,” Duenyas said. “I don’t think that people should think anymore, ‘Just because I have an undergraduate degree, I know this and will spend my whole life doing this.’ Now there is so much outsourcing that you really need to build skills because what you’re doing today is not necessarily what you’ll be doing five years from now.”

Health Care’s Health
The same wave of retiring baby boomers that’s opening up jobs for young people is also creating opportunities in some fields. Health care is the most obvious example.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, health care spending is expected to increase two times faster than inflation for the next decade. Prof. Jeffrey Alexander, who concentrates on health management policy, attributes the expansion to the population aging and the increase of heart disease. The health care industry, he said, needs people with a range of skill sets — not just doctors and nurses.

“The market has changed primarily because the diversity of types of healthcare organizations has increased dramatically over the past 30 years. This opens up opportunities for folks who are trained in health care management,” he said. “It’s no longer a single track occupation into a hospital.”

Strong Fundamentals
No matter what the economy’s state, the fundamentals of getting a job are the same.