David Cronrath is always worried. As the dean of this university’s architecture school, he’s worried about his students finding jobs that are rewarding and fulfilling, he said, and he’s worried about whether they’ll all be able to fulfill their individual career objectives.
But a study released earlier this month by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce that found architecture majors have a 13.9 percent unemployment rate straight out of school doesn’t have Cronrath particularly concerned.
It’s because the profession of architecture is undergoing a transformation, he said. Students in the school are no longer content to limit themselves to learning the very basics of the industry and are instead starting to branch out into subfields such as sustainability, real estate development and historic preservation.
The study pooled data from the 2009 and 2010 American Community Surveys on recent college graduates aged 22 to 26 and found architecture’s unemployment rate was nearly 3 percent higher than its closest contemporary — arts majors came next with an 11.1 percent unemployment rate, and humanities and liberal arts followed at 9.4 percent. And many students said their professors have made them well aware of this trend.
“It’s almost sort of funny at this point how much we’ve talked about it,” said Brian Glassman, a senior architecture major. “No one’s really it,” said Brian Glassman, a senior architecture major. “No one’s really too seriously worried about it, I don’t think.”
While architecture majors at this university need to attend graduate school to become licensed architects, Cronrath said they’re still eminently hirable — even if they’re doing slightly different things than just building buildings. And the high unemployment rate largely stems from the collapse of the housing industry, which is now showing signs of improvement, during the recession.
“The design and construction industry is notoriously cyclical, and it will come back to life as it has after past recessions,” said Robert Ivy, the executive vice president and CEO of the American Institute of Architects, in a statement. “There are signs that the construction industry will rebound slowly in 2012 and gain traction in the coming years, and there will be a demand for architects with the most up to date training and education.”
The numbers aren’t causing much internal strife in the architecture building for a few reasons, Cronrath said. On one hand, there’s the sense the housing industry is rebounding, and by the time current majors can actually enter the job market — many students here spend a few years working and interning with a firm, going to graduate school and becoming licensed later — they feel jobs will be easier to come by.
“With every downfall we can grow up from that,” said Alison Medlyn, a junior architecture major. “I feel like within the next 10, 15, 20 years, everything will pretty much be back to normal.”
On the other hand, there’s the varied education Cronrath says the architecture school seeks to provide, one that educates students not just on the basics of the profession but also on ways to approach problems creatively, to think in a way that would make them valuable candidates for many types of professions.
Cronrath remembers a scene from a few years ago, when he was dean of the art and design college at Louisiana State University. The head of the business school came to him asking whether business students could learn from Cronrath’s designers “with purple hair” because he felt the students needed to learn how to solve problems in a non-linear way.
“We have skill sets that have a broader application than we thought previously,” Cronrath said.
He added: “I think we’ve seen the bottom.”
jwolper@umdbk.com
