PASADENA, Calif. — On the same night this month that the Senate was killing legislation to bail out U.S. automakers, seniors in vehicle design at Pasadena's Art Center College of Design were putting on what should have been the show of their young lives.

Standing in suits beside sleek, carefully constructed models of futuristic-looking cars and video screens with 3-D renderings, they smiled and handed out resumes, hoping to catch the eye of a car-company recruiter.

There were few to be found.

"Normally there are a lot of designers from the big companies, but with all that's going on, nobody is coming," said Julius Bernardo, 27, who has dreamed of designing flashy cars since childhood and spent about $100,000 on his education. "At this point in time, you have to start thinking about other kinds of jobs."

In normal times, the senior show at Art Center, one of world's top transportation-design schools, is an employment gold mine, an auto-world agora where carmakers go to stock their studios with talent to work on the vehicles of the future. Industry legends such as BMW design chief Chris Bangle and former Aston Martin designer Henrik Fisker walked almost directly out of their senior shows and into automotive history.

But with the industry suffering its worst sales decline in a quarter-century — General Motors Corp. and Chrysler are awaiting word on $14 billion in emergency aid from the Bush administration, and Ford is only slightly better off — these are not normal times.

Carmakers, desperate to cut costs, have reduced or frozen hiring. Product planning and design have taken a hit, on top of layoffs on the assembly line, pay cuts in the executive suite and reductions on a host of expenses including auto shows and office supplies.

Although designers make up a tiny fraction of the workers in the auto industry, their importance is immeasurable; without good design, cars don't sell. A car company without designers has no future.

GM has cut its research-and-development budget and told Congress this month that it would eliminate eight models by 2012. Ford has cut back on plans for new truck designs. And Chrysler has seen its design staff shrink by about 15 in the past year from about 75.

"There's no question that this is a hard time, and there's no indication it's going to get better in the near term," said Larry Erickson, a former designer at GM and Ford and now chairman of the transportation-design department at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, which rivals the Art Center in prestige.

The Detroit college has long been a pipeline to jobs at the Big Three automakers, and Erickson said that, until recently, half of each graduating class, which generally ranges from 10 to 20 students, would land positions in carmakers' studios.

Last spring, when the college's seniors had their big show, only one ended up with a job at an automaker, students said. A second found work designing bicycles. The rest are still looking or working in design jobs outside transportation.

"They told us ahead of time, and they were right, that it was going to be a really bad year," said Mykola Kindratyshyn, the lone hire from that class. He turned down an offer from Toyota to choose GM, where he designs Cadillacs.

"In the past, everybody got offers. If you didn't get a job with a car company, you were sure a supplier would hire you. Not anymore."

At this year's Art Center show, Sean Whang, who moved to Southern California from Seattle to get his degree, presented a car model he imagines for a Japanese anime character. But his display also included the redesign of a blow-dryer.

While his fellow December graduates still hold out hope for a job at Toyota or Honda — representatives of both companies attended the show but made no offers — Whang says he has his sights set on Samsung Electronics Co., where he would like to design cellular phones. "I learned to draw and think like a car designer, but now I'm going to apply it to consumer products," he said.