Government struggles to recruit

The federal government must do a better job of recruiting college students to fill its growing need for young, talented workers, a recent report suggests.

According to a report from the Partnership for Public Service (PPS), only three percent of the 1.9 million federal government employees are under 25 years of age. The report cites a lack of information about public sector opportunities as the most important reason that college graduates do not work in government.

At first glance, Princeton students seem to be bucking this trend. From 1996 to 2005, 77 percent of Wilson School M.P.A.s took their first jobs after graduating in public service. According to Career Services, 5.2 percent of the members of the Class of 2005 who accepted full-time jobs chose to work for the government.

These statistics may be misleading, however. While many recent graduates are working in public service, they are not necessarily working for the government, but rather for other nongovernmental or nonprofit organizations.

"What the Partnership for Public Service is worrying about, as are we, is how to get more students ... into government service either as their first job or later in their careers," Wilson School Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter '80 said in an email.

Also, according to the PPS website, many young government employees are merely seeking "short-term work experiences to bolster their careers before they move on to the next challenge."

Politics professor Alan Patten said that none of the students he advises mentioned working for the government as part of their future plans. He also attributes student disinterest to the lack of information.

"My impression has been that the state sector has not been aggressive in recruiting students," Patten said. "The politics department gets lots of requests to publish jobs and internships to students, but almost none from the government," he said.

Career Services, however, pointed to the strong governmental presence in this year's Career Fair, and maintained that the government has been reaching out to students.

"Many [government organizations] want to be at the forefront of recruiting and make sure that our students know they are a viable employment option," Rebecca Ross, associate director of Career Services, said in an email.

Slaughter, though, said the "problem of the federal job market has been one as much of supply as of demand."

"We and other public policy schools find that the obstacles to getting U.S. government jobs at a level where our graduate students can use the education they have worked so hard to gain are still enormous," she said. "Our students are certainly interested in government careers."

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Slaughter emphasized that the Wilson School was working to overcome these obstacles. One example of this effort, she said, was the Wilson School's successful lobbying of the Presidential Management Fellows Program to remove the cap on nominations. The program prepares graduate students for public policy work.

Justin Cohen '06 said that the Wilson School does a "remarkable" job of promoting government career opportunities through panel discussions and frequent guest lecturers. He also said that the undergraduate policy task forces offered to concentrators gives students opportunities to interact with government employees.

"One of my policy task forces enabled our group to travel to Washington twice, the first time to conduct interviews and the second time to present our work," Cohen said in an email. "Through these experiences, students are exposed to the public service environment in a way that no panel discussion or information session can replicate."

He added, though, that students must be "proactive in taking part in these opportunities."

With almost half of all government employees eligible for retirement by 2010, the need for young workers is even more pressing. To address this problem, Patten suggested that the government must first improve its image.

"There is a perception among students that government jobs are more bureaucratic and not as stimulating as jobs in private firms," Patten said. "The government needs to dispel the students' notion that they will enter a massive, paper-pushing bureaucracy," he said.

Slaughter also agreed that the government needs an image makeover to compete with private firms and NGOs.

"Government service must be at the core of public service; we must reward and admire those willing to sacrifice income to serve the country with the prestige and honor that is their due," Slaughter said in an email. "That is a long process, one that must be embraced first and foremost by those running for office and then by the citizenry at large."

Patten added that broad social factors might also be responsible for the lack of interest in government jobs.

"In the recent past, American political attitude has tended to be conservative and skeptical about the government's capability to be a positive contributor to societal problems," he said.

"There are going to be government jobs no matter what, but the question is whether or not the government can compete successfully for the best talent," he said. "My worry is that the government is systematically losing in this competition."