A visiting economic expert told a group of college career counselors meeting in Buffalo Thursday that the recessionary spiral now dragging the economy down will not soon be over. And it will leave lasting economic and social damage in its wake.

Which just means, he said, that the job of college career placement offices is more important than ever.

Paul Harrington teaches and researches economic trends for the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. Publicly vilified months ago for predicting that the U. S. unemployment rate would reach 10 percent, Harrington noted Thursday that the actual rate is now nearing that level and, he said, stands to remain in that range well into next year.

May figures put the official unemployment rate at 9.4 percent, a 25-year high. This week President Obama added his voice to those who predict that national unemployment will climb to double digits this year.

Harrington told the annual convention of the Eastern Association of Colleges and Employers that job-seekers asking when the U. S. manufacturing- based economy will get back to the way it used to be, pulling generations of willing workers into secure middle-class lives, is like new parents asking when life will get back to the way it was before they had children. The answer to both questions is a firm “Never.”

“We’re in a different world,” Harrington said. “We’re used to quick recessions and quick recoveries, where ‘the long run’ is six weeks.”

Manufacturing firms that trained their own employees in specialized skills and provided lifetime livelihoods to industrious but minimally educated workers are gone for good, Harrington said. He said the manufacturing economy that must replace it — bioengineering, energy, information technology — will require both more formal education and more active contacts between colleges and universities on the one hand and employers on the other.

Schools will not only have to work harder to help their graduates find jobs, Harrington said, but also to assist their students in acquiring the “soft skills” need in the workplace, such as punctuality and teamwork.

Those are skills that used to be picked up in the high school and college years, in entry-level, part-time jobs. But he said those jobs are harder to get now because fewer jobs are being created and older workers are frozen in place, unable to move up or even to retire because of shrunken nest eggs.

Harrington said there is one respect in which the current downturn is like all that have gone before. It hurts those on the margin the most.

“This is very much a blue-collar recession,” he said.

For all the attention that has been focused on Wall Street layoffs, he said, unemployment is still the most severe among manufacturing workers and among those with the least formal education.

“You are creating population areas where the majority of adults don’t work,” he said. “Kids who grow up in these circumstances will be less productive as adults.”

The government response to such a situation, Harrington said, will correctly begin with spending on public works projects. But because such projects have a high expenditure-to-job ratios and often create only temporary jobs, he said more public assistance should be funneled through private-sector employers, boosting those businesses’ ability to create and retain the kind of jobs that provide lifetime career ladders for workers.