Urban League has two goals at convention

“I am really excited just to be able to see a large number of people who look like me coming together around education and unemployment,’’ Parrish, a rising senior at Purdue University, said while standing in the middle of the expo and career hall at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. “That’s been a very big concern in my life right now.’’

There is a two-tiered mission for the National Urban League’s 2011 convention. The first is to shine a light on the nation’s unemployment crisis and help find jobs for those out of work. The other is to change Boston’s image by replacing televised images of the school desegregation fight of the 1970s with positive experiences in the city’s shops and restaurants.

Thousands of people from 40 states are expected to attend the three-day conference, which has the theme “Jobs Rebuild America.’’ Yesterday featured a conversation between Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. on the importance of education, particularly higher education, for a child’s economic future.

In attendance were the underemployed and unemployed, such as recent college graduate Wayne Pryor Jr., who received a bachelor’s degree from Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina. He hoped to find work among the corridors of the career expo, which is free and open to the public through Saturday - and if not work, at least contacts and critiques about making resumes stand out in a jam-packed pool of applicants.

Sixto Escobar is among the nearly 14 million Americans out of work.

“The job market is like the housing market,’’ Escobar told a consortium of higher education recruiters, including those from Suffolk University, the University of Massachusetts Boston, and Tufts University. “It’s a buyer’s market, but in this case, it’s an employer’s market.’’

Escobar, who according to his resume has a master’s degree in city planning from Harvard University, has been jobless since October. The 70-year-old retired from a career in public affairs with the federal government about three years ago but said he needed to continue working.