Jorge Mondaca, who in May graduated from Stetson University in Florida with a marketing degree, works for the interactive department of Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Fla. It's a "dream job," he says.
Less dreamy is the additional, part-time job he took to supplement his income — computer salesman at a local Best Buy store. But taking the $9-an-hour retail job was necessary, he says, if he wanted to save for a new apartment and coming college-loan payments, get gasoline for his car and add to his DVD collection.
The upshot: a 60-hour work week. At the speedway, "I was put on a big project right away," Mondaca says. "At 5:15, I would jump in the car, switch shirts, and (get to Best Buy) five minutes later."
Young college graduates new to the job market have always struggled to make ends meet — particularly those in fields like art, acting and social-service work. But these days, even some graduates with more marketable degrees find they need to take a second job. There are no hard statistics, but veteran career counselors say moonlighting is increasing higher up the career ladder. Richard Leger, director of career services at Boston University, who has worked in the field for 32 years, says he sees the two-job trend "coinciding with the rising cost of living and the corresponding very high rents in cities like Boston, New York, San Francisco."
"The world is different now. It's harder," agrees Jill Sanborne, a financial consultant with Smith Barney who publishes a Web site for students called MyCoolCareer.com. "When I graduated, you could just get a degree in anything, and you'd be all right, you'd be fine."
Now, career counselors and academics say today's two-job graduate may hold an undergraduate degree in almost any discipline (other than engineering and investment banking, where starting salaries are about $50,000).
A big reason is that today's college graduates have more student-loan debt to repay than their predecessors. "The cost of going to college is increasing at double-digit rates every year," says Steven Rothberg, who lists all types of entry-level jobs on his Web site, CollegeRecruiter.com. "Compared to 15 years ago, it's triple — yet pay rates are not triple. They've gone up by 20 percent or 30 percent."
Today, Rothberg says, students are "at graduation and they're looking at what their monthly expenses are going to be ... they find that those expenses are far greater than the income that they're going to receive." Many who stay in their chosen careers, he says, "spend their weekends going to garage sales and selling things on eBay" to supplement their income.
"The starting salary for teachers, journalism majors and marketing majors in a lot of areas of the country are $25,000 to $30,000 a year," says Rothberg. "It's doable if you're living in the Midwest or in a smaller city," he says, "but if you want to live almost anywhere on the coasts, you're in for a world of hurt."
If not hurt, at least stress. Hajin Suh, a director's assistant at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, graduated this year from New York University with two goals: to eventually attend law school and to immediately find an apartment. She has the apartment, which she shares with three roommates, and she is preparing to apply to law school, but to support herself, she is working two jobs and a 65-hour work week.
Suh earns $16 an hour at the lawyers' organization but says the pay isn't enough to cover her living expenses or coming college-loan payments. So she also works as a waitress in a Manhattan seafood restaurant, where she gets $3.85 an hour plus tips, which can range anywhere from $80 to $200 a night.
Suh has accumulated almost $30,000 in college loans and says her payments will total $300 a month beginning this month. Her other monthly expenses include $650 for rent and utilities, a $50 cell phone bill, and $76 for the subway and bus card she uses to get to work. And she recently spent $1,250 for a three-month program to prepare for the Law School Admission Test.
She spends 40 hours over three days at the restaurant, and 24 hours at the bar association. Adding her hourly wage as a waitress, tips, and what she makes from the bar association, Suh estimates that she's earning about $40,000 a year. She knows her expenses might be cheaper in a smaller city, but she likes her nonprofit job, which involves helping attorneys battling substance abuse, and loves living in New York.
Alyson Potts, another recent graduate, landed a job as a communications associate for Planned Parenthood in Boston. Armed with a political-science degree from Syracuse University, Potts says she initially wanted to work either in government for an elected official or for a nonprofit organization. Then she learned during her job search that her salary would be somewhere between $20,000 and $35,000 — not enough to pay for an apartment or even cover other living expenses.
"I had this vision in my head of getting the exact job that I wanted right away, but then I saw what starting salaries really were," Potts says. But because the Planned Parenthood job best matched her interests, she took the offer and supplements her income by working odd weekend shifts at a local department store. Instead of moving into an apartment with friends, she moved back to her parents' home.
"I don't think anybody really wants to go back home to live, (but) it was a decision that I made because it made sense," she says. As for her Planned Parenthood job, she's glad she's working in a field she believes in and hopes she can advance to a better-paid position there. "I'm more happy to put in my time to do something I love," she says. "If someone offered another job that paid me a lot more money, I probably wouldn't take it."
Some young professionals count on income from their extra jobs not to cover expenses, but for extras. Ricky Fung, who graduated from Cornell University last year, is an account manager at CDW Government Inc., a computer-discount reseller company in Washington, which pays $25,000 base salary plus commission. He also does tutoring to earn money for investments.
His rationale: "I don't want to wait until 10 years from now and then start investing ... then wait another 10 for my gains to come through."
Randall Hansen, a business-administration professor at Stetson University, worries that recent college graduates who are working multiple jobs will get burned out too quickly or be unable to put in the concentrated 10-hour days many companies now expect. Employers he has spoken with are concerned about how a second job may affect their employees' performance, he says. Companies fear that second jobs will "take employees' concentration and focus away from their main job — that they'll come in bleary-eyed in the morning and lose some of that edge they have," he says.
In fact, Mondaca, the Stetson graduate at the speedway, in August decided on his own that excelling at that job required more commitment and was more important than earning extra cash.
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