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OXFORD, England -- Business school students at Oxford University plan to spend at least one of their breaks in Dubai, not just to swap gray skies for sunny ones but to secure something more lasting: jobs.
With job opportunities dwindling in London and other financial capitals, particularly in banking, Oxford's business school is organizing a trip to the wealthy emirate so students can network with companies there. School advisers say the oil-rich Persian Gulf region is a bright spot in an otherwise grim global economy.
As the global financial meltdown has shaken up the free-market capitalist system, it has also prompted some of the best and brightest at the world's elite schools to rethink their careers. Banking jobs that until recently were there for the plucking have all but dried up. Students are scrambling to assess options they once would have scorned: academia, engineering, manufacturing, the nonprofit and public service sectors.
"Nobody knows where he sees himself in a year because of the markets," said Egor Nikolayev, a business school student at Oxford.
It's the same story on the other side of the Atlantic.
"There are a lot of people who just want to have Goldman Sachs or J.P. Morgan on their resume. Now people have to really evaluate what they want, and they have to find out what their true passions are," said Kevin Tolson, an undergraduate at Duke University in North Carolina.
The number of jobs that opened up in October in the London financial district known as the City -- where many Oxford business school grads typically land -- fell to about 5,400. That's down 48 percent from the same month a year earlier, when more than 10,300 new jobs were available, according to a survey by recruiting firm Morgan McKinley. Those numbers are likely to contract further as the full force of the financial crisis hits home.
Grant Phillips, who advises Oxford business students on job searches, said both students and universities will have to be creative, citing the Dubai trip as an example.
Chris McKenna, director of Oxford's MBA program, also predicted that the loss of jobs in the banking sector would reverse a trend in which people with backgrounds in science or engineering were lured to finance by outsized salaries.
On Wall Street, the banking industry lost 70,000 jobs during the past year, according to the Financial Services Roundtable, an industry trade group. There are now 460,000 banking jobs on Wall Street, down 13 percent from a year earlier, the group says. It predicts additional cuts in the coming months.
Matt Heiman, a senior at New York's Columbia University, is one of the lucky few with an offer from J.P. Morgan. He got the offer in August after working at the bank as a summer intern and having previously interned at Bear Stearns -- experiences that put him in a strong position as jobs dwindled.
Though Heiman is evidence that some hiring is happening, he said many of his peers are looking for something else to do.
The poor job market is also affecting students from overseas who would normally want to move to the U.S. for a job. Harsh Bajpai, in his last year of an undergraduate program in metallurgy at ITT Bombay, an Indian technology school on the outskirts of Mumbai, now has low hopes of landing a job in finance.
These days, even government -- long viewed on Wall Street as the bane of the capitalist system -- is attracting some would-be bankers.
Similarly, students who might otherwise look for high-paying business jobs seem to be eyeing public service professions such as teaching. Nonprofit organizations in Britain and the United States that recruit undergraduates to teach in poor schools have seen an increase in interest from college students.
"The market's changed a lot," said Jane Zhou, a senior at Duke. "It's very difficult to find jobs, so I'm applying to more places and exploring different options that I didn't know I would be interested in before."
