Others have addressed the issue of your advisors' misguided advice. I'll add only that I can't tell you how many times, on these fora and in other online and offline discussions, I have heard some variation on "my undergrad profs told me not to worry about the job market, and now I can't get a job, and neither can anyone else!" This statement is generally followed by a round condemnation of undergrad faculty everywhere who fail to give their students a realistic picture of the job market. When someone responds, "well, anyone with half a clue could have told you that the job market was awful and not likely to improve," they reply, "sure, but my advisor..."
You are at a crossroads that many many others have passed before you. You have to choose between hearing only what you want to hear and getting a more thorough picture of reality on which to make your decision. Many have opted for the former and came to regret it. Just keep that in mind, and don't come back here in eight years whining about how your advisor assured you that you'd find a job.
I am curious, though, why would you tell a college senior to forget about grad school?
My generic advice for traditionally-aged college seniors is not to forget about grad school entirely, but to forget about it temporarily. I would recommend a minimum of two years doing something completely non-academic before applying to grad programs.
Why? Because many traditionally-aged college seniors - particularly those with the interest and aptitude for graduate study - have remarkably little experience of non-academic life. They have never held a full-time job, except for temporary summer gigs. They have not developed an off-campus social life. They have not interacted regularly with people unlike themselves: people of different ages, educational backgrounds, talents, socioeconomic backgrounds. In sum, they are familiar with only a relatively small slice of human life and experience, and most of that slice involves the experience of being in school.
Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with any of that. At 22 years old, a college senior has been an adult for a very short time and has not had time to become wise in the ways of the world. Moreover, that college senior has been busy getting a four-year degree, which is in itself a very worthwhile endeavor.
The question, though, is whether that college senior should invest the next 8-10 years of their life in pursuing a degree that will qualify them only for positions that are both poorly paid (relative to other professions that require 8-10 years of post-BA training) and prohibitively hard to get. Now, there are certainly some people who invest those years and end up glad they did: I am one such person. For some people, grad school is a reasonable choice. But I submit that it is hard to determine whether that is true for any given college senior until that college senior has spent a few years doing non-academic things and interacting with non-academic people. Because until you've done that, you won't really know what you are passing up by opting for an academic career.
That's the main reason for my generic advice, but there is another. In my experience, academics who have spent part of their lives as non-academics tend to make better
academics than those who have never ventured outside the ivy-covered walls. For one thing, if you have spent a few years outside of academia and decided that your non-academic career options are definitely wrong for you, you will approach grad school with stronger motivation to succeed and a clearer sense of purpose. You may also find that your non-academic endeavors help you develop and more clearly articulate your research interests. You may even find yourself drawn to a specialization you hadn't before considered that suits you much better than your original plan. In grad school, I ended up specializing in a field of history completely unrelated to my undergraduate work: I had never taken a single class in it. I ended up there in large part because my post-college non-academic life got me interested.
For another thing, much of the work academics do involves working with non-academics: most notably undergraduates. Of course, we were all undergraduates once, but we were undergraduates with a real passion for our studies. The same is not true of the vast majority of the students we teach. Scholars who have never worked alongside anyone who does not share their love of their discipline often do less well at connecting to non-passionate students. Many end up muttering resentfully about how obtuse their students are and how they wish they could teach the honors seminar more often, or move to a school with higher admissions standards. Don't become one of those mutterers: they and their students would have been far better off if they had taken a few years away from school, figured out that they liked the thought of a six-figure income, and never gone to grad school at all.
