Shane Farren has a timing problem.
In 2011, when the Dallas native enrolled at Texas A&M and picked what was then one of the most lucrative college majors, oil prices were soaring above $100 a barrel and energy companies were recruiting petroleum engineers as early as their freshman year.
Four years later, with a degree in hand and oil prices tanking to an 12-year low, Farren had to turn to his Plan B - graduate school, a part-time job at a Dallas-area oil company and hopes of a rebound.
“I’m just taking it step by step,” Farren said. “But I really want to stay in the industry.”
The boom-and-bust cycles in the oil business can be brutal for those wanting to make it a career. Recent graduates entered the field when colleges boasted near 100% job placement rates and six-figure jobs awaited the top of the class.
Today, the biggest colleges in Texas have enrolment caps in place and advise petroleum engineering majors to consider other disciplines, take entry-level jobs to stay in the industry, or go to graduate school until conditions improve.
But the next two graduating classes - the petroleum engineers who entered school before the 2014 crash - are still the largest in history.
The few universities that put enrolment caps in place before the price collapse, such as Texas A&M and the University of Texas at Austin, had been getting as many as 15 applicants for each available spot, said Jon Olson, chair of UT’s petroleum engineering department.
“Really, it was kind of out of hand,” Olson said. “There was so much demand.”
Those who research the industry realised several years ago that increased demand could oversaturate the job market, especially if there was a steep drop in oil prices.
2010 “was when we collectively in the US started talking about it,” said Lloyd Heinze, a professor at Texas Tech who has collected data on petroleum engineering programmes since the 1970s. “But a university is a large boat, and it’s hard to turn very fast.”
In 2010, there were 4,721 petroleum engineering students in the US, according to Heinze’s data. Today, there are 11,332.
“That gives you an idea of what happens when universities think there’s a job market there,” Heinze said. “We’ve collectively probably produced way more students in the last five years than we should have.”
For Farren, the challenging classes were worth it, and not just for the money the career would yield.
“Taking classes revolving around oil, I just fell in love with it,” he said. “I find myself picking up books about oil and gas and reading them. And I’m a slow reader, so that should tell you something.”
Companies were courting freshmen and sophomores for internships, and Farren worked them during the summers. Typically, companies offer interns who are entering their senior year full-time positions at the end of the summer.
The June before his senior year, the price of oil peaked at $115 a barrel. By December, it had fallen to less than $70. Now it’s below $30.
That precipitous drop forced oil and gas companies to cut more than 250,000 jobs worldwide, according to industry consultant Graves & Co.
The first jobs to go were those closest to the rigs, the actual hands-on work in the field. But it wasn’t long before employees with the least seniority were cut. And there are no employees with less seniority than those who haven’t even started working yet.
“One of my good buddies had a full-time offer that got rescinded,” Farren said. “That was a real eye-opener for me. That’s what got me thinking, ‘Whoa, we’re in some bad times.’”
The last comparable slump was in the mid-1980s, when crude oil prices fell more than 46% between January and March 1986. Students then faced similar job shortages.
“There’s not many industries like this,” said Mike Minarovic, a 1987 UT graduate who now manages an oil and gas company in Houston. “The price of an F-150 truck doesn’t go down 50% in 12 months. The lows are low and the highs are high.”
In the long term, enrolment caps and high grade-point average requirements will help reduce class sizes. Heinze’s data shows that enrolment tends to lag oil prices by about two years.
There are still jobs in the industry - just fewer of them, said Daniel Hill, head of Texas A&M’s petroleum engineering department.
“We tell students in times like this you just have to work at it a lot harder,” Hill said. “You can’t just wait on campus for jobs to come to you, like you maybe could a few years ago.”
In 2014, about 80% of Texas A&M graduates were placed in full-time positions or in graduate programmes, Hill said. That percentage, while lower than petroleum placement in the past, was still higher than the national employment rate for college graduates, which was 69.4% in 2014.
But in a December poll in a Texas A&M senior seminar, only 50% of those graduating have job offers, and 10% plan to go to graduate school, Hill said.
At Texas Tech, Heinze estimated the numbers are even lower. “I’d be surprised if more than 25% of them have a job,” he said.
The consensus among petroleum engineering professors, professionals and students is that the industry will be back on the rise by the time this year’s freshmen graduate. Some experts cautiously predict prices to climb into the $60 range by 2020. By then, Heinze predicts that class sizes will have shrunk to a reasonable level.
“Maybe instead of 15 applicants for every chair, we’ll have six or seven,” UT’s Olson said.
The demographics of the industry also ensure that companies will hire in the future as engineers brought on before the 1980s price crash begin reaching retirement age.
But for the three or four years of students in between - the ones like Farren in grad-school limbo - prospects may be more uncertain.
“I’ve heard from friends still in school that it seems like a lot of the companies that go to A&M now to recruit are mostly looking at freshmen and sophomores for internships,” Farren said. “They’re not looking at the juniors or seniors as much. So those guys are just stuck in the middle.”