This summer I wrote about what I saw as a particularly grim job market for the business school graduates of 2009 (see Job Market Update and Job Prospects for B-school Grads). Back then I wrote:

The students who will really, truly feel this recession are the graduates of 2009 (and maybe even the graduates of 2010). I expect the job market moving forward to be abysmal, and for the hiring season of 2008-2009 to largely be a bust.

There is now growing evidence that this is the case (see Crisis Hits the Business Schools). Alison Damast of BusinessWeek writes:

Second-year students…without job offers appear to be in the most precarious position. According to a survey by the umbrella group MBA Career Services Council, about 70% of the 77 schools surveyed said they saw a downturn in full-time recruiting opportunities in financial services in October. Meanwhile, about half of the schools said overall full-time job postings and on-campus recruiting this fall was either flat or down 5% during the same period, with some indicating it has fallen as much as 10%.

In the coming year, the job market for MBAs may begin to bear a striking similarity to the period following the dot-com bust when some banks and consulting firms rescinded or renegotiated job offers they had extended to second-year students. That hasn’t happened this time around—yet.

As bad as that may sound, I think that those are rosy numbers. The worst is yet to come, and this job market will turn out to be far worse than that of the dot-com bust. This economic recession is far deeper and more broad-based than that of 2001-2002. In fact, I have been hearing anecdotally from sources (both internal and external to my university) that while recruiters have continued to visit and interview, there are increasingly fewer and fewer offers.

So I still anticipate an extremely difficult year for MBA grads looking for jobs. And unfortunately, I have had to revise my estimates for the next academic year. It is starting to look like it will be worse for the class of 2010.

I sincerely hope I am wrong.