What are the consequences of graduating into a recession?

[brendan]

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/livewire/business_technology/recession_loeff/
Worse, there's growing evidence that the financial consequences of entering the job market during recession could last from a decade to a lifetime, according several depressing academic studies.

For example, those who took first jobs at such times had to settle for lower salaries and climb more rungs, according to Columbia University economics professor Till von Wachter, University of Toronto economics professor Phil Oreopoulos and Andrew Heisz of Statistics Canada, who studied the fate of Canadian graduating classes of 1982-1999. They found it took some 10 years for the recession-era grads to reach salary parity with grads who entered the workforce in flusher times.

"But if the recession is bad, it can take longer," von Wachter said.

A lifetime, say. Stanford Business School economics professor Paul Oyer's research found that MBAs who start investment banking careers during bull markets will earn $1.5 million to $5 million more on average over a career than those who graduate during recessions. Even those who expediently work in other fields temporarily are less likely to ever become investment bankers.

Oyer finds the consequences can last 20 years. That's why, he said, bankers are not born to work on Wall Street, but made by circumstances.

...

The silver lining: earnings of those who begin their first professional jobs in bad times do eventually recover. "You spend ten years of your life earning less," von Wachter pointed out, "and the summary of your lifetime earning is worse." But "people do catch up." Eventually, he said, the financial disadvantages of graduating during a recession tend to fade away.

Here are the links to the two academic studies referred to above:
http://www.columbia.edu/%7Evw2112/papers/iza_dp3578.pdf
http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/oyer/wp/mba.pdf