Ben King, 25, expected nothing less than a comfortable, high-paying job after graduating with a degree in computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Instead, he now waits tables and tends bar at Chili’s Grill & Bar in Peoria, Ill.

During the first six months after he graduated in 2001, King met with company recruiters at job fairs. He applied almost nonstop for at least 100 computer engineering jobs across the nation — all to no avail.

“You can only be told you’re not good enough so many times before you take it to heart and it starts to sink in,” King said.

King’s story is an example of what has many college students worried. A recent survey by I-ELECT, a political reporting project at the University of Illinois, indicated that students there rank the job market and the economy as important as they do another huge issue facing the country: the war in Iraq. Thirty-six percent rated the economy extremely important.

College degrees have long been thought to guarantee better jobs, higher wages and more comfortable lifestyles, but sometimes this no longer is the case, said Philip Gardner, director of research for the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University.

Instead, many graduates with degrees in fields once thought recession-proof – engineering, computer science, information technology and communications – are finding themselves unemployed or underemployed.

A recent study by CollegeGrad.com, an Internet job-finder for students, concluded that 18 percent of college graduates were working in jobs that did not require their skills or education.

A study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank that tracks the economy, indicated that unemployment among college graduates went from 1.7 percent in 2000 to 3.1 percent in 2002.

This is trifling compared with the unemployment rate for people of the same age who are not in college, but numbers such as these have made the economy a high priority for many college students.

“It worries me because I’m afraid that when I graduate there’s not going to be a lot of opportunities even though I have the degree and I worked so hard for it,” said Danielle Crumb, an 18-year-old University of Illinois student and one of the respondents to the I-ELECT survey.

The economy and the job market are different today than they were for Crumb’s parents. The structure of the economy has changed with technology, said Fred Gottheil, a University of Illinois economics professor.

Globalization of the economy means competition for jobs formerly held by American workers, said Donna Chilton, human resources manager for Nestle Confections and Snacks, a central Illinois division of Nestle USA Inc.

Nationwide, the chocolate giant is now sharing high paying jobs, such as industrial engineers, among plants.

Last year, Nestle closed a plant in Fulton, N.Y., and outsourced the production of its Crunch candy bar to Brazil. The company also cut many of its management and high-paying positions. In some cases, plants that were close enough to each other shared managers and employees.

“We are now competing globally and have to look at more cost-effective ways of doing things,” Chilton said.

Domestic factors such as the dot-com bust in 2001 contributed to the loss of many high-tech jobs, Gardner said.

The Economic Policy Institute reported that employment in the U.S. software industry fell by 128,000 jobs between 2000 and early 2004. During that period, 100,000 new jobs producing software for export to the United States were created in India.

John Earnhardt, spokesman for Cisco Systems Inc., which makes the equipment used to route traffic over the Internet, said the dot-com bust was a major reason his company imposed a two-year hiring freeze and laid off 10,000 workers in 2001.

“There was a lot of business coming in that just pretty much, on a dime, stopped,” Earnhardt said.

But the situation is beginning to improve, Gardner said, citing preliminary results of his annual survey on the employment trends for college students. He expects slight growth in accounting, business, communications, retail, tourism, health care and nursing. Growth in engineering will continue to be slow, but some jobs will become available nationwide, he said.

“They may not have their perfect job, but they’re going to have to get into the labor market,” Gardner said. “There’ll be jobs.”

But recent college graduates are competing with thousands of unemployed people with years of experience, he said.

King, the 2001 graduate who couldn’t find a job in computer engineering, has had to compete against people with 15 to 20 years of experience.

“It’s very frustrating. . . .” he said. “I went to (Illinois) because it was the third best in the nation for computer engineering.”