It's difficult to read recent headlines like "Recession May Be Over, but Joblessness Remains," (New York Times, Sept. 20) or "Recession Raises Poverty Rate to a 15-Year High," (New York Times, Sept. 16) and feel confident in post-graduation opportunities. Unless there's a spot reserved for you in your family's foreclosure business, prospects are extremely daunting for anyone planning on finding work soon after finishing up in Waltham. A question too seldom asked, especially considering current harsh economic and employment realities is, "What is our education here worth?" Most of us will leave the University without technical skills that we haven't acquired outside of academia. We will join the 30.5 percent of Americans with "some college or associate degree," according to 2009 Bureau of Labor Statistics data. What does a bachelor's degree do for us? Does its substance only become apparent when complimented by a graduate degree?

It is unfairly reductive to look at our undergraduate experience strictly in those terms. The truth is that we're not boiled down to such figures. Time here does, as advisers and professors often emphasize when I go to them with career concerns, teach us how to think critically. That's one of the major arguments in favor of the liberal arts experiment, and on a global scale, it is one of the stronger points of a product of the American education system. But in the face of so much domestic uncertainty, it is fair to expect some guaranteed returns on our substantial investment of time and capital.

Hoping to hear an encouraging story, I asked a friend and recent graduate, Arun Narayanan '10, how his job search was going. Narayanan was on the executive board of BTV when I first joined the organization, and I always admired his work ethic. It was typical to find thorough e-mails from him with production schedules far ahead of shooting dates, often time-stamped from around 4 a.m. I also knew that he stood out at his internship at the leading public relations and advertising firm, Ogilvy. I expected to hear about prospective employers fawning over him.

This was not the case. In an e-mail to the Justice, he writes, "Nobody was 'hooking me up' with work. I didn't expect them to. But I did expect there to be some kind of job placement process." To be fair, the Hiatt Career Center provides fantastic support from capable counselors. The trouble many seniors and recent graduates encounter is the dearth of exciting employers with appealing job offers. Narayanan did use Hiatt extensively, but the center's resources fell short. He writes, "In ideal world, I would have signed up at Hiatt on a list for people interested in full-time advertising/marketing jobs, and then I would be automatically entered into interviews with companies looking for recent graduates if my résumé qualified. And I assure you, if there had been such a thing, my résumé would have qualified, because it's pretty golden."

Brandeis was founded in 1948, and that youth compared with other similarly ranked universities means our alumni career connection pool isn't as extensive as many of us would like. Because of this, administrators must take a proactive approach in attracting worthy employers to our campus. What use is a résumé, brilliantly edited by Hiatt, without an appropriate destination? That was the sense of many disappointed attendees of last week's career fair, who found it to be dominated by nonprofit organizations and biomedical companies. A brief glance at the organizations recruiting at the fair will find recognizable names of medical companies like Pfizer and Novartis next to organizations like Girl Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts and BBYO, Inc.

If this university is to fulfill its responsibility in the face of post-recession challenges, it must make career services a priority. Hiatt provides fantastic services for students who seek them out, but the vast majority of appealing job opportunities they offer are unpaid internships. World of Work scholarships are a fantastic incentive to work without compensation in order to gain real world experience. With fewer available paid positions for inexperienced graduates, perhaps Hiatt should extend some sort of fellowship or grant-writing assistance for students who have already said goodbye to campus.

As students here, we are in the midst of something that won't translate to a bottom line. Most of the undergraduate experience can't be relayed over the course of an interview. The school needs to market the often-unquantifiable merits of the "What we are doing here?"-not through tacky and nonsensical posters like the one hanging off the Shapiro Campus Center, but by showcasing and publicizing student achievements loudly and clearly so that employers can't help but notice.