Students’ jobs ended before they began

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Thousands of people are losing their jobs on Wall Street—some before their first day of work.

They polished resumes, they sweated interviews, they landed dream jobs. But now a small group of college and business school students are discovering their careers at Bear Stearns ended before they began. JPMorgan Chase, which bought the beleaguered investment bank last month, rescinded many of their job offers.

Yashoda Khandkar, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, is among 250 Bear hires who now find themselves unemployed in one of the worst financial job Markets in years.

“The worst part about the entire situation is that it’s a really hard market for us to look for other jobs,” Khandkar said. “We probably can’t get as good of jobs as we would have had.”

Ivy Leaguers like Khandkar have more options than most, of course. And for now few of them have mortgages, unlike millions of Americans who are struggling just to pay the bills.

But instead of starting new jobs at Bear, these students are now hunting for work along with a growing number of bankers and brokers. Since August, the financial industry has shed more than 38,000 jobs as a result of the credit crisis and the collapse of Bear Stearns. Citigroup added to the misery, saying it would eliminate 9,000 more jobs. No one thinks the pain will end there.

The angst is most acute at Bear. Many of its 14,000 employees are expected to lose their jobs in the coming months. JPMorgan is running what its chief executive, Jamie Dimon, has called a “military operation” to decide which employees at both banks will stay and which will go.