Students entering the job market during the next few years won’t have a market to enter if history is any indication, an economics professor said Wednesday.

Even with a stimulus package being rushed out of Washington, D.C., professor Bill Lastrapes doesn’t believe the outlook is good for job searchers.

Employment is typically the slowest thing to turn around in a bad economy, Lastrapes said in a phone interview Wednesday.

“On average, we’re talking about four years of employment decline. Since we’ve been in the employment decline for a little over a year, then we have another three or so years to go, and this does seem to be a recession that’s worse than average,” he said.

Lastrapes said he worries the stimulus package, which passed through the House last week, may not provide the type of stimulus Americans need.

“One thing about a stimulus package is it has to stimulate spending quickly to try and generate improvements in employment. It’s not clear that a lot of spending is going to help right away,” he said.

One of the major problems Lastrapes said he sees with the package is a lack of value in the job-creating projects proposed.

“The common example is, if the government simply wants to create jobs, you hire a bunch of people to dig a hole, then you hire a bunch of people to fill it back in again,” Lastrapes said. “The stimulus is supposed to be spending on valued things.”

The professor did see some positive points in the bill, saying there is a good chance it will improve people’s confidence in the economy.

“Everybody’s scared right now. I think everybody wants to see something done,” he said. He added people don’t want to spend money when they’re afraid, and that the government should take action to alleviate those fears.

But the stimulus may have benefits for Georgia public schools, said John Millsaps, spokesperson for the Board of Regents, in a phone interview Wednesday.

Though it has not been determined how the money will be allocated, he said the Board was proposing projects that would immediately create jobs, specifically ones related to infrastructure.

Napp Nazworth, lecturer in the Department of Political Science, said it is difficult to predict if the package will be successful.

“It’s hard to know if this stuff is going to work when you’ve never tried before,” Nazworth said in a phone interview Wednesday. He noted that no stimulus package of this scale has ever been proposed to Congress before.

Nazworth described the package, saying, “You’ll see lots of different goals in the bill – create jobs, prevent job loss, help states and some goals tied to more of an ideological agenda.”

Nazworth elaborated, saying the White House is looking to use the current economic crisis to create several changes while many Republicans want to focus only on issues such as job creation.

Greg Wilson, a sophomore from Marietta and chairman of the College Republicans, said he is against the stimulus package.

“It includes lots of pork barrel projects,” he said. “For example, they’re giving $1 billion to subsidize Amtrak, which hasn’t shown a profit in years.”

Wilson said he worries most about his future.

“We can’t afford this debt right now,” he said. “We’re going to be the ones who end up paying for it.”

College Republicans passed out “bailout bucks” at the Tate Plaza on Tuesday to explain their opposition to the bill.

Louis Elrod, a junior from Mount Airy and president of the Young Democrats, shares similar concerns.

“It’s a little bit scary to think that we already have a multi-trillion dollar deficit.”

Nevertheless, Elrod said a deficit was better than being required to keep a balanced budget.

“We’d have a balanced budget, but there would still be people out there suffering,” he said. “Yes, we have a deficit, so we need to look at how to keep our economy on track to pay it back.”

Elrod said although the job market outlook for the next few years is bleak, the stimulus package is exactly what Americans need.

“The healing process takes awhile, but we do think that this money is going to jump start the economy, that people are going to start investing back in their country and in their economy.”

The most important projects are those related to transportation, helping people to get to their jobs, and those related to renewable energy, he said.

“With ‘green collar’ jobs, I think we can kill two birds with one stone, helping fix our energy problems and putting people to work in a new industry that will actually benefit us 50 years down the road.”

Still, one of the major criticisms opponents have of the bill is the massive amounts of spending.

Nazworth said it comes down to one question: “Do we want to pay now or pay later?”