Kelley Bryan checks her blueberry muffins after removing them from an oven during a cooking class Monday at L’Ecole Culinaire chef training school, in Ladue, Mo. Bryan is hoping to re-enter the job market next year, retrained for a new career.

Many jobless people have reached a conclusion that captures the depth of the unemployment crisis: Looking for a job is a waste of time.

The economy is growing. Yet it’s creating few jobs. That’s why in the past eight months, 1.8 million people without jobs left the labor market. Many had grown so frustrated by their failure to find a job that they threw up their hands and quit looking for one.

And it’s why Barbara Bishop sat down at her kitchen table in suburban Atlanta last month and joined their ranks. Her decision came seven months after she quit a PR job that seemed about to be axed. Sending out resumes got her nowhere. So Bishop made a list of her skills and decided to launch her own business.

“I don’t want to look any more,” she said of the job hunt. “It’s become very discouraging.”

The nation’s unemployment rate is 9.7 percent. But so many jobless people have quit looking that if they’re combined with the number of part-time workers who’d prefer to work full time, the so-called “underemployment” rate is 16.5 percent.

Their outsize numbers show that even though the economy is growing, the job market is stagnant. Employers remain reluctant to hire.

The exodus did halt in January, when a net total of 111,000 people re-entered the job market. But 661,000 had left in December. And the overall trend since spring has been people leaving the work force.

“It’s very unusual,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. “At this point in the business cycle, we should be seeing some sort of labor force growth. Layoffs have abated, but there really has been no pickup in hiring.”

Some workers are concluding it’s more practical to return to school, start a business or care at home for their kids until the job market improves. In some cases, it even makes financial sense to stop looking for work.

Those leaving the work force have been beaten down by the competition for few jobs. A record 6.4 unemployed Americans, on average, are vying for each job opening, according to the most recent Labor Department data. That’s up from 1.7 jobless people per opening in December 2007, when the recession began. And a record 6.3 million people have been jobless for at least six months.

Even if the economy continues growing this year, it won’t likely recover many of the 8.4 million net jobs that vanished in the recession. Economists say the nation would be fortunate to get back 1.5 million of those jobs this year.

As head of the Go! Network group in St. Louis, Chuck Aranda has seen how the slog of job hunting wears people down. His networking group offers seminars and breakfast meetings to get frustrated job-hunters out of the house.

“I think there are people who are doing this alone,” Aranda said. “They’re in their basements, they’re on the Internet. And they’re getting disconnected. They lose hope.”

At some point, the exodus will reverse. Zandi thinks many will return by the second half of the year, once it appears employers have ramped up hiring.