Finding employment was relatively easy when Angelina Pinto, 27, earned her B.Arch. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2006. “The market was awesome,” she says. Now, she is spending up to 10 hours a day hunting for a position after getting laid off in December from a large firm in New York. “I’m contacting every single person I know, looking through the AIA directory, looking at every single firm,” she says. “There are fewer and fewer jobs.”

Jenna M. McKnight