Steven Ramirez has it made.

Mr. Ramirez, 22, of Powell, Ohio, will be walking out of his graduation ceremony at Carnegie Mellon University and into a job at Proctor & Gamble.

Today, the graduating seniors of the University of Pittsburgh who have not secured future employment are quietly uttering the same prayer: "Please God, don't make me move back home."

The economic news is not encouraging to those seniors who are donning their caps and gowns this weekend at Pitt and in the coming weeks at other local colleges and universities.

"It doesn't help that you see all this gloom and doom in the headlines. That certainly adds to the anxiety," said Shawn Graham, the author of "Courting Your Career." He said that in his day job, as an associate director at the MBA Career Management Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he saw students in the business program that were caught up in JP Morgan's purchase of Bear Stearns and wound up losing job offers that had been extended to them.

Despite the bad economic news, employers expect to hire 8 percent more new college graduates from the Class of 2008 than they hired from the Class of 2007, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. That figure is off from the fall when employers projected a 16 percent increase in college hiring for the Class of 2008.

"New college graduates just entering the job market will likely find fewer opportunities than originally anticipated. It will also mean that graduates who were focused on particular industries, such as finance, may need to adjust their target industries," said Marilyn Mackes, NACE executive director.

For the graduates finding jobs, the good news is that starting salaries are on the rise, with some exceptions, notably in the business fields, NACE reported.

Accounting graduates saw no change in their average salary offer of $47,429. Business administration/management graduates received an increase of 0.3 percent, bringing their average salary offer to $44,195. The average salary offer to finance graduates moved up 1.5 percent over last year, to $48,616. Marketing grads bucked the trend and reported an increase of 4.9 percent, bringing their average salary offer to $43,318.

On the other hand, computer science graduates saw their average salary offer increase by 14.7 percent to $59,873. Even liberal arts graduates saw their average salary offers rise 12.9 percent to $35,378.

The seniors at Carnegie Mellon University don't graduate until May 11, and for them, Mr. Graham said, "there is still time before graduation for students to network."

Networking, according to some professionals, is key.

Mr. Ramirez has had his job since November. He majored in mechanical engineering and went to a series of interviews with employers who were in town with the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. First, he had an offer from General Motors, but he really wanted to work for Proctor & Gamble after interviewing with that company's recruiter.

So, as the deadline to accept GMs offer closed, Mr. Ramirez said, "I e-mailed Proctor & Gamble and said this is really where I want to work."

They brought him in for a series of interviews and beat the GM deadline with a better deal. He will be working in Cincinnati in product development.

"All of my friends in engineering and the more technical fields like computer science, they're not really nervous," said Andrea Zin, 21, of Squirrel Hill, who majored in English with a minor in photography at CMU.

Miss Zin is, indeed, nervous.

"People in drama and the arts or English and history, you really need to go to grad school, so there's tension there," she said.

Miss Zin's plan is to spend about six weeks in New York trying to secure permanent work, either in publishing -- "it's really hard to get into that kind of work" -- or photography, where she would be a photographer's assistant, a job she said is "pretty low on the food chain."

Beyond the six weeks, she is not really sure.

"New York is just too expensive not to have a job," she said.

Pitt graduates who have not yet gotten jobs have a year of free access to the campus career services office after graduation.

Brian Heddleston, the employment services manager, said he has not seen anyone panicking. Despite the news on the economy, he said he is still receiving about a dozen e-mails a day from employers looking for graduates to fill entry-level jobs.

In just two hours that he was in a meeting on Thursday, he noted, he received requests for applicants for jobs in pharmacy, information technology, creative design, Web development, and sales and marketing.

For those who have not yet graduated, Mr. Heddleston's advice is for students to take advantage of career opportunities while they are still in college.

He said internships and cooperative employment programs provide both great experience and the opportunity for employers to get to know potential future employees. "Internships are very, very important."

Clubs and organizations also look good on a resume, he said, and good grades are key.

He also said the students should "make sure they participate in the activities that Career Services puts on for them."

But most of all they should keep meeting people and talking about their ambitions for future employment without being discouraged by what they see in the want ads, both traditional or electronic.

"Seventy percent of all jobs are unadvertised," he said. "You've got to be able to network."