The 18-to-29 age cohort is having the toughest time finding a job in today’s challenging workforce environment, according to recent reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which suggests 37 percent in this group are unemployed—the highest rate in three decades.
That staggering figure, though, hardly applies to recent Residential Property Management (RPM) degree graduates from Virginia Tech and Ball State University. Those two schools continue their phenomenal track record for hiring, as most in those programs have full-time jobs lined up even before being handed their diplomas.
“All but one of our graduating students this spring has a job,” says Rosemary Goss, Ph.D., RPM Advisory Board Professor and Program Director, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Va. “Most had multiple offers. The one exception was a student who was seeking apartment industry work in a specific part of the country.”
Goss says past years’ success rates were similar. “The toughest thing for our graduates was not finding a job, but choosing which offer to take,” Goss says.
At Ball State, more than 75 percent of RPM students find apartment-related jobs even before graduation, and students from the class of 2011 already are receiving employment offers. Like at Virginia Tech, the BSU graduates often are hired by the companies where the students served their internships.
Carla Earhart, Ph.D, CFCS, Professor and Director, RPM Program, Ball State University, Muncie, Ind., says that BSU’s RPM master’s program has become especially attractive to students who couldn’t find a job after earning a Bachelor’s degree in another field. “If a student is mobile, we have a 100 percent employment rate with students from this program,” Earhart says.
Both schools conduct annual job fairs in the spring and encourage national, regional and local apartment management firms to participate. Both also include executives from apartment management firms on their program advisory councils. For information on these and other schools that offer RPM classes, visit www.naahq.org/education
and click on the college and university programs link on the menu on the left side of the page. – NAA’s Paul Bergeron