May’s the month for college graduation, but more than half the seniors tossing their caps into the air expect they won’t have a job offer, let alone a job by graduation day.

They’re competing for work with those who graduated last year and still haven’t landed a job or with other recent graduates, often the first to be laid off, who are back in the labor pool.

“I can’t find a job anywhere,” said Julie Boyajian, a 23-year-old business major from Washington Township, N.J., who will graduate from Rutgers University on May 23.

Company hiring for college graduates is flat compared with last year, and last year was the worst year in a decade. Meanwhile, the number of unemployed workers between the ages of 20 and 24, including college graduates, is 1.4 million, a 10-year high.

“I think there are a lot of students that are stunned by what’s going on,” said Chet Rispoli, director of career development at Temple University in Philadelphia. “It’s bleak. I’ve been in this business for 25 years, and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

In fact, a quarter of the people whom Rispoli’s career center helps are Temple alumni who have been laid off.

The Class of 2003 grew up in a decade of rising prosperity and entered college at the height of the economic boom when companies competed to hire new graduates.

To students, the diploma looked like a one-way express ticket to a bright future. “They thought that the college degree was a guaranteed formula for success,” Rispoli said.

That’s not the story this year, according to interviews with seniors, career counselors and experts. The road to getting a job is longer and harder. While some graduates are finding work, others, discouraged and frustrated, are settling for less, rethinking their options or going back to school for a graduate degree. Why, they wonder, their self-esteem in tatters, did they invest all the money and effort to make it through college just to end up among the unemployed or underemployed?

“You pay all that money for the degree that was supposed to take you places, and now what’s it worth? I don’t even know what I’m worth,” complained Cherry Hill, N.J., business major Snehal Sindhvad, who graduated from Drexel University in March 2002.

“My parents came to this country, to the Promised Land, to give me all the opportunities they never had,” said Sindhvad, whose parents emigrated from India in 1971.

Until December, he held a short-term management job setting up airport security training. He has since sent out hundreds of resumes a week, with no offers.

“It’s a hard time,” Sindhvad said. “You have to stay strong and keep your head up.”

College career counselors are trying to bolster students’ self-esteem along with their resumes. Last year, the University of Pennsylvania’s career center brought in Penn graduates to talk about their efforts to find work during the 1991 recession.

“They were all doing extraordinarily well,” said Patricia Rose, director of career services. “It’s just a first job and it may take a little longer to find, but you aren’t going to be in the first job forever.”

Indeed, studies show that college graduates still earn more and have better prospects than those with high school degrees.

“But it’s hard to tell somebody that when they can’t get an interview,” Rispoli said.

Meanwhile, counselors are urging graduates to be “flexible.” That often translates into accepting a job outside their field for a pay that is lower than expected and then moving to a place where they don’t particularly want to live.

And no wonder:

In 2001, only 23 percent of students anticipated that they would graduate without a job offer, compared with 53 percent this year, according to research by Monster.com.

The number of unemployed workers between the ages of 20 and 24 is 1.4 million, the highest in 10 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The unemployment rate has risen from a 31-year low of 3.8 percent in April 2000 to its current level of 6 percent.

During that same period, there have been 4.4 million announced job cuts, according to employer announcements as tracked by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a Chicago outplacement and recruiting firm.

Applications for initial unemployment benefits exceeded 400,000 for a 12th straight week, the longest stretch since the U.S. economy was emerging from a recession in 1992.

Skipping the job market altogether, many college seniors are moving directly into graduate programs, which have seen a flood of applications. “It is, if you will, a port in the storm,” Rose said. This year, a projected 539,000 will take the Graduate Record Examination admissions test, up from the typical 380,000 during the mid-1990s.

The outlook is flat for hiring new college graduates, reports the National Association of Colleges and Employers, a nonprofit group that tracks recruitment of college graduates. In NACE’s April survey, 42.4 percent of companies said they planned to decrease college hiring, 36.3 percent said they would add jobs for graduates, and 21.2 percent said hiring would remain the same.

Rutgers senior Julie Boyajian hadn’t been too worried about finding a job until December, when her boyfriend graduated from college and couldn’t find work. That was her wake-up call. She polished her resume and started going to job fairs, “but there are thousands of people waiting in line to hand in their resumes.

“It makes you realize that you have to compete,” she said. “Once I graduate, I’m going to do this full time and really go out and look until I find a job.”