Lori Marcotte, a communications major at Rhode Island College, is a recent graduate who is working at Del’s Lemonade in South Attleboro. Higher-paying jobs, once available, are now hard to find.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

Lori Marcotte, who graduated last month from Rhode Island College with a degree in communications, had hoped to land a job in public relations by now. But Marcotte ran into the worst economic recession since the 1930s. So she is living with her parents and working part-time at a Del’s Lemonade in South Attleboro.

Marcotte said she started her job search well before graduation. “I’ve been looking for a year, trying to get a glimpse of what kind of job I could land,” she said. Now, she’s thinking of going back to school to get another degree because she hasn’t been able to find a job in her field.

Marcotte and her fellow graduates have caught the worst job market in decades, according to local college placement officials. A report from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) predicts it will not get better soon. Bad news for the Class of 2010 arrived this week when a NACE survey of employers projected a further 7-percent decrease in hiring from 2009.

If there’s a silver lining to that report, it lies in the regional breakdown. Employers in the Northeast reported plans to increase hiring by 5.6 percent, while the rest of the country projected hiring decreases ranging from 3.2 percent in the Midwest to 36.8 percent in the West.

The NACE, which provides information on the college job market, reported last spring that only 19.7 percent of college students looking for jobs had found one. That compares to 51 percent for the Class of 2007 and 26 percent in 2008.

Not all Rhode Island colleges survey their graduating students on their post-college destinations. Some wait six months after graduation, so they don’t have figures for the Class of 2009 yet. Johnson & Wales University is surveying recent graduates now.

Mark Higgins, dean of the College of Business Administration at the University of Rhode Island, said around 40 percent of URI business students looking for jobs had found one by graduation. Usually, he said, the figure is closer to 65 percent.

At Bryant University, Judith Clare, director of the Amica Center for Career Education, said between 35 and 40 percent of graduating seniors reported they had either accepted full-time work or were going to graduate school fulltime. When the economy is booming, she said, that number would be closer to 60 percent.

At Providence College, John Nonnamaker, executive director for the office of career services, said 32 percent of graduating seniors had landed jobs. He said PC hadn’t surveyed graduating seniors before, so he doesn’t have past numbers for comparisons. He pointed out that Providence College has a large number of education majors, who usually get hired later in the year, so the figure may be artificially low.

Nonnamaker said many employers make their campus recruiting trips in the fall, not the spring. The bleak hiring projections of NACE, he said, are reflected in the number of employers who are showing up. “In talking to other Big East schools, most are reporting a 20-percent to 30-percent decline in on-campus recruitment,” he said. “Some employers are coming on campus to maintain their brand, but they’re not doing any hiring. We’re hoping there might be a secondary wave of recruitment in the spring.”

At Johnson & Wales, Sherri Ispir, director of career development, said she was surprised at the NACE projections. “Our sense is that slowly and surely the market will turn around,” she said. “Part of our job is to keep the morale of our students up. I was very disappointed to see the NACE figures.”

There is some evidence that the drumbeat of bad news is discouraging students from even looking for jobs. Linda Kent Davis, director of the career development center at Rhode Island College, said the number of employers at the college’s spring job fair was off 25 percent this year, which didn’t surprise her. What did surprise her, she said, was that the number of students attending the job fair was off 30 percent. “I think students were afraid, so they didn’t even bother to show up,” she said.

But there are some areas where employers are still hiring. Edwin Koc, director of research at the National Association of Colleges and Employers, said students with math-oriented degrees such as accounting, computer science and engineering are still in demand.

At Johnson & Wales, Ispir said hospitality and culinary students are finding jobs, although they’re more likely to get one or two job offers as opposed to five or six. Liberal arts students often have a tougher time in the job market. Joshua Medeiros of Swansea graduated in 2008 from Rhode Island College with a communications degree and a goal of being a broadcast journalist. He got a job as an unpaid intern for a radio station in Somerset, and has kept his previous part-time job at Kohl’s in Seekonk. He said he’s sent out lots of resumés in the past year, without much luck. Medeiros said he occasionally goes to Web sites to look into corporate jobs — “But my heart and soul are set on being part of a newsroom.”

The tough job market for college students can have a ripple effect on people without college degrees, said Paul Harrington, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. Harrington said an analysis of federal employment data shows that 84 percent of college graduates under 25 have jobs. But, he said, only 56 percent of them have jobs that require college-level skills. Those who have taken lower-level jobs then push out the high school graduates and teenagers who could be doing the work.

As for Attleboro’s Lori Marcotte, when she’s not serving up the Del’s, she’s keeping her skills sharp by writing for a small magazine called One Women’s Place. She’s also taking additional classes at RIC to get a certificate in nonprofit studies, and as long as she is taking those classes she has an internship at the office of news and public relations at RIC.

But her job at Del’s is seasonal and will end next month. “None of my jobs are permanent, but I’m doing the best I can to make an income for myself,” she said.

asmith@projo.com