Graduates and Jobs: A Grave New World
REMEMBER the college graduate of 1968? Standing there on commencement day with diploma in one hand and a bundle of job offers in the other? Seniors that June scarcely had to look for work. Their main problem seemed to be deciding which corporation offered the best opportunities, or which fellowship led to the most promising future.
Not any more. The recession may be just about over in the marketplace, but its effects linger on the nation's campuses. The largest graduating class in history--an educated army of 816,000--is entering America's certified credential society and learning to its sorrow that a degree is no guarantee of a suitable job. Like the dollar, the diploma seems to have been devalued. At Boston's Northeastern University, a sign in the placement office reads "Grave New World."
The high-ranking seniors of '71--at least from the best colleges--will have no serious trouble finding employment. But they may have to work harder at selling themselves to an employer, the job may not be the one they had hoped for, and the salary may be lower than they like. They will certainly not, as in the past, have jobs conferred upon them. "Normally a placement director is wined and dined by firms wanting to ingratiate themselves with the institution," says Cornell Placement Chief John Munschauer. "This year no one even bought me lunch." Corporate recruiters still visit campuses, but not so frequently or enthusiastically as before. At Princeton, there were 85 recruiters this spring compared to 169 in 1968. The engineering school at the University of Kansas greeted 55 recruiters this semester, down from 255 three years ago. In many cases there was less recruiting because the recruiters themselves had been fired.
The actual job offers told an even grimmer story. A survey of 140 U.S. colleges and universities indicated that between March 1970 and March 1971, job bids for male B.A.s dropped 61%, and a staggering 78% for Ph.D.s. Actual hiring will be down less, probably by 25% at the B.A. level. A possibly incomplete but telling poll of the 944 men who graduated from the letters and sciences division of the University of Wisconsin last year showed that only 174 were working full time; and of that number, only about half had the kind of job they wanted.
Intellectual Proletariat
On campus, the reaction to the dearth of jobs ranges from nonchalance to panic to anger--an anger often directed at the colleges that trained the students to no seeming purpose. Some speak darkly about the creation of a new "intellectual proletariat" in the U.S.
"Just like Ceylon," says Columbia Senior Roy Rosenzweig, a history major, "where 10,000 people went to college and couldn't get jobs." He might have added India, Latin America and Africa. TIME Correspondent Frank Merrick, who recently visited several big Midwestern universities, "was amazed that so many students seemed to be drifting, bewildered by what was happening to them and resentful that no employer seemed to want to hire them."
On the other hand, there are thousands of seniors this year who seemingly could not care less that few corporations sought their talents. The much-heralded New Consciousness of America's youth--including an indifferent attitude toward the Protestant work ethic--has provided many graduates with a cool, wait-and-see attitude toward the future.
Some do not want a job at all. Others are much more interested in working toward a career that fulfills rather than pays. In any case, their new values keep them from suffering as much anguish as previous generations would have endured in a similar situation. "In the '50s and early '60s, most students' faith in careerism was nearly as tenacious as their faith in the American dream," says Edward Dreyfus, a counselor at U.C.L.A. "Today, undergraduates tend to view a job as only part of their total person. Their identity is not going to be contingent upon their employment."
Watery Clam Chowder
The seniors who most need the New Consciousness are the B.A.s in the humanities. And they constitute about three-fourths of the graduating class. Says William Balfour, vice chancellor for student affairs at the University of Kansas: "We'll find some of them behind lunch counters, digging ditches or learning trades." The number of openings in elementary and secondary school is falling off, and companies are interested in specialists not generalists. As a result, liberal arts seniors are the most be wildered of the graduates. According to John Berry, a senior at Wisconsin's Beloit College, "The standard joke is that after you graduate you can either work for Yellow Cab in town or for the security force on campus. My father kept saying that with a B.A. the world was my oyster. I find that it's more like a watery clam chowder." Echoes Steve Ukman of the University of Kansas: "A whole generation of humanists is coming out of school, and who wants them?"
New Militants
Black graduates, at the moment, are proportionately having less trouble than whites. Job offers are down, but by only 10% says the director of a place ment service for 60 Negro colleges. More important, though, the opportunities are wider. The proportion of blacks going into teaching has dropped from 80% to 46%, while the number going into business administration is rising as more and more corporations seek to acquire an integrated image. The rare black Ph.D. this year can command a salary $4,000 or so higher than a white with the same training.
Women, the other new militants, are not faring nearly so well in the slack job market. A few companies have made special efforts to hire them in management jobs, but as one corporation recruiter put it: "Blacks are still on the upswing, but women have slowed down.
Prejudice is far more ingrained here than anywhere else on the hiring spectrum." The major problem lies in the fact that there are more and more teachers being trained at a time when the falling birth rate is starting to reduce the elementary-school population. And in their anxiety to find work, more and more men are taking some of the available teaching openings, as well as be coming bank tellers, social workers and telephone operators--all jobs traditionally held by women.
Present Possibilities
Normally, about half of the nation's college graduates go into business, large and small. These days, almost as many go on to graduate study or to schools for law, medicine and the other professions. A much smaller segment of students seek work in Government. Not all the job opportunities are equally promising (see chart, page 52). Herewith, TIME presents its own estimate of present and future career possibilities, based on correspondents' reports, the advice of personnel experts and the new attitudes of the students themselves:
BUSINESS. In the recent recession, large manufacturers were the first to cut back their college recruiting. This year, the businesses that have been hiring the most students are accounting firms, insurance companies, public utilities and oil. A.T. & T. plans to hire about 3,500 graduates this year; the accounting firm of Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co. will take on more than 1,000 for its 105 offices across the country; and the Prudential Insurance Co. will hire 500 (the same number as General Motors). Qualified graduates will find a number of openings in banking, construction, building-materials manufacturing and retailing. The firms that have cut back the most on their student hiring this year are electronics, chemicals, drugs and of course aerospace, where the only new opportunity these days, it is said, lies in becoming a sky marshal.
Despite all the talk about the environment, the ecology movement has produced comparatively few new kinds of jobs in either business or Government, although there are some openings for engineers working in water or heat pollution and the like. However, the situation is expected to improve. Melissa Parsons, 23, a 1970 engineering graduate of Stanford, has begun the kind of career that others may eventually follow. She is a member of an "environmental systems group" that does regional planning for the Bechtel Corp., one of the nation's leading design-construction firms. She finds no incongruity between her sex and her job. "Girls make very good engineers," she insists. "There is no manual labor, and they can keep ideas straight."
Girls, as many companies have discovered, also make very good computer technologists. Currently the market for programmers and systems analysts is down slightly, but that too will improve. At Manufacturers Hanover Trust, computer operations are headed by Geri Riegger, a systems engineer who was recently named the bank's first female vice president. About half of the bank's 350 data processors are women earning from $12,000 to $25,000 a year.
Despite the job shortage, many of this year's applicants for corporate jobs are very independent, both in their styles of clothing and dress and their attitudes toward companies. They are not afraid to inquire about a prospective employer's stance on pollution, civil rights and open housing. They are also not keen about make-work jobs. "You just can't get by these days with putting a graduate design engineer on the drawing boards and having him put threads on bolts for two years," says one recruiter for a major chemical firm. Other businessmen agree that industry must invent challenging, decision-making jobs for its bright young recruits. "And we must give young executives time off to become involved in the church, politics and social causes--and back them," says William D. Eberle, board chairman of American Standard. Because of the economic slump, it may be easier to hire top ranking students today, Eberle notes, but he believes that companies must work hard to counter young people's antipathy toward business. "The problem is more widespread than industry thinks." Eberle adds, however, that "many students are still going for the fast buck today. They tell me, 'First I'll make it, then I'll do the socially conscious thing.' "*
There is a nationwide decline of from 5% to 15% in applications to graduate schools of business. And there is a New Consciousness among the students now enrolled. Many business graduates are either forsaking large corporations for smaller firms, where there is more freedom of movement, or going into business for themselves. Five years ago, only three Harvard M.B.A.s went into business for themselves directly upon graduation; this year, 25 plan to take the plunge, and some are turning down high salaries to do it. One self-starting venture is the new Cambridge, Mass., "Autotorium"--an electronics-equipped auto-repair garage founded by three 1971 M.B.A.s, one of whom is planning to further his education by taking a night course in mechanics. The Autotorium is part of the rapidly growing service industry, which also includes amusements, hotels and a multitude of other enterprises.
Not only the button-down accounting major becomes an entrepreneur these days. "Business? Like wow! Most of my friends are in business," explains one barefoot boy in bell-bottoms and beads, referring to the lucrative new counterculture enterprises that constitute what is sometimes known as Hip Capitalism. Hundreds of erstwhile flower children have become proprietors of record stores, organic-food shops, restaurants and boutiques. One recent graduate of Xavier University, Steven Reece, 23, of Cincinnati, has become the manager of nine pop artists, including his wife, Barbara Howard, for whom he has booked appearances on the Mike Douglas and David Frost shows. Reece also gives free advice to black high school kids eager to become performers.
GRADUATE SCHOOL. This year applications to graduate schools are up slightly over 1970 totals, despite the fact that it is now clear that the long climb up the ladder to the Ph.D. no longer guarantees secure footing at the top. Economic recovery will provide some new jobs for these specialists, but not enough of them. Says New York University Chancellor Allan Cartter: "We have created a graduate-education and research establishment in American universities that is about 30% to 50% larger than we shall effectively use in the 1970s and early 1980s."
This impressive but top-heavy creation is primarily due to Sputnik, which blasted off when the class of 1971 was in second grade. Thanks to the threat of Soviet dominance in science and technology, the nation's doctorate programs were vastly expanded. In 1957, about 9,000 Ph.D.s in all fields were granted in the U.S. This spring there will be more than 30,000, and unless the machinery slows down, 60,000 will be turned out annually by 1980.
All this may provide an admirable addition to the sum total of human knowledge and much personal satisfaction as well. But as far as jobs go, big numbers spell big trouble. Industrial and Government research work has been drastically cut back, and colleges and universities simply cannot begin to accommodate the new Ph.D.s, or even the old ones for that matter. The Cooperative College Registry in Washington, D.C., a placement service for teachers, receives ten applications for every available job. Some sociologists and anthropologists are still wanted by universities, but teachers of languages, English, history (except black history), the sciences and math are particularly hard hit. In chemistry there are 819 Ph.D.s listed for 23 job vacancies.
Some of these specialists are trying for teaching jobs in the new, expanding community colleges and even high schools. The principal of the high school in Dayton, Texas (pop. 3.000), has hired Clement Lam, a Ph.D. from Ohio University, to teach the school's only physics course and math. Lam was one of 15 Ph.D.s who applied for the job. However, the long-range prospect for Ph.D.s in science is not so bleak. If substantial funds were devoted to environmental improvement, for example, it would provide work for many of the technicians formerly employed in aerospace. Even now, Ph.D.s in civil and mechanical engineering are not having the trouble that the aerospace and electronics men are having.
LAW. Although many recent graduates have had trouble finding jobs, applications to some law schools have doubled this year. "1971 is going to be the roughest year ever for a kid to get into law school," says Charles Consalus, director of the Law School Admissions Test. This year more than 100,000 students are applying for the 35,000 places available. The increased popularity of law is partly due to the drying up of the Ph.D. market. Mostly, though, it reflects students' concern for social change and the means of bringing it about. Says one law school administrator: "This college generation is perceptive enough to realize that the law is where the action is."
A surprising number of students have switched from engineering or science to law. Ray Herman. 24, who entered the University of Chicago Law School shortly after getting his M.S. in physics, explains that "The public men who are making the important decisions today are all lawyers." According to Joe Tom Easley, this year's managing editor of the Texas Law Review, every new law class enters with "a higher percentage of students bent on combining law with social change." Two years ago, Easley was the only member of his class to spend the summer working with Nader's Raiders in Washington; last summer, a dozen did so.
In the past few years, many Wall Street firms have allowed their lawyers to do pro bono publico work on company time. Even so, many of the more socially conscious young attorneys are joining the Office of Economic Opportunity's Legal Services Program or working for "public interest" law firms. One such lawyer is Tom Meites (Harvard Law '69), who is a counsel for a group of concerned Chicagoans called Businessmen for the Public Interest. In that capacity, he and two colleagues have presented major courtroom challenges to unfair legislation, like the Illinois law that allows a landlord to win a judgment against a tenant without first notifying him. Meites chose public-interest law, he says, because he "couldn't bother with the conventional lawyer's willingness to take either side."
MEDICINE. The nation's medical schools are also being besieged by a record number of applications from college seniors, as well as Ph.D. candidates switching from science or engineering. Harvard and the University of Southern California could more than fill next year's class with doctorate applicants. As in law, the proportion of blacks in the next freshman class is on the rise (from 2.8% in 1969 to 6%), and women will constitute 11% of the prospective doctors.
The record number of applicants also means a record number of rejections. The medical schools have only 11,800 openings for more than 26,000 applicants--and at least half of this year's rejects were qualified to enter. Ironically, pockets of the country are faced with a serious doctor shortage, and U.S. hospitals are relying on a foreign "brain gain" to get by: non-Americans now hold about a fourth of the nation's internships and residencies.
All forecasts show a vast need for more trained people in the field of health. Dr. Roger Egeberg, former Assistant Secretary of HEW, estimates that the country needs 50,000 more doctors, 150,000 medical technicians and 200,000 more nurses. Some of the newer specialties are thoracic surgery, neurological surgery, physical and medical rehabilitation, and preventive medicine. One new field that bridges two disciplines is biomedical engineering, developing such devices as the pacemaker for the heart. Several programs have been devised to train "paramedics," physicians' assistants who can take over some of the doctors' more routine tasks. One of them is Mrs. Joan Carvajal, 29, of Greeley, Colo., who recently graduated from the University of Colorado medical school's new nurse-practitioner program. She does examinations and preliminary diagnoses for two pediatricians and makes hospital visits to instruct new mothers. "Nurses are asking for more responsibility," she says.
As in law, there seems to be a new altruistic spirit among the candidates for medical school. Admission committees, which used to be skeptical of would-be doctors who "pulled an Arrowsmith"--talked about their dedication to humanity--are now getting used to the phenomenon. Says Dr. David Tormey of the University of Vermont medical school: "The contrast between the senior class and the far more liberal freshman class is almost a generation gap within the student society itself." Many of the new students are interested in going into public health rather than into lucrative private practice.
Dr. Matthew Dumont of the Massachusetts department of mental health sees everywhere a "new face of professionalism" turned toward social change. "Physicians, lawyers, ministers, city planners, architects, educators, engineers are emerging from the universities," he says, "with the sophisticated and critical perspective on their roles in society that John Dewey saw as the true function of education. The remarkable thing is that at a time of overwhelming technical sophistication, expertise and hyperspecialization, professionals are discovering a common purpose--the well-being of people."
GOVERNMENT. This year the Civil service exam, covering everything from postal clerks to narcotics agents to explosive inspectors, was given to 112,000 students, or 65% more than last year. But only about 10,000 will be hired, roughly 2,500 more than in 1970. Many students would draw the line at working for the Defense Department or the Internal Revenue Service, but are eager to participate in educational-reform programs or get a start in the environmental sciences. Law enforcement and safety are two fields with good job prospects.
One oddly embarrassing surprise to some of the professional people who approach the Government for a job is discovering how well they will be paid. Federal workers have had ten raises since 1962. Attorneys, chemists and engineers in Civil Service Grade 15 now make from $24,251 to $31,523--figures that were arrived at by averaging the salaries of comparable professionals in the business world. They have job security and pensions as well. State and local government pay scales are lower, but the problems and the jobs can be challenging. For example, business school graduates hired by Los Angeles County have learned to their surprise that a department head in the county government has about the same budget, personnel and purchasing problems as a department head at General Motors.
"ALTERNATIVE" JOBS. Many members of the class of '71 either do not want a "real" job right away, or do not want one that will lead to a conventional career. This is especially true of men facing the draft--about one of every four graduates this year. Those with low lottery numbers have spent most of their extracurricular time and energy trying to figure out whether to go quietly, join the National Guard, become C.O.s, develop ulcers, cut off a finger, go to prison, go to Canada or just freak out. Careers are not their immediate concern.
But thousands of others who are relatively safe from the draft also seem reluctant to commit themselves to a vocation. Of the 1,139 students in Harvard's class of '67, 90 declared themselves "undecided" about their career plans; of this year's 1,100 or so, there are at least 250 in that limbo. Last year the placement director at Beloit wrote to every junior, suggesting that they chat with him about how to prepare a resume to get a job. "I didn't get one response," he says. "Vocational planning to them is anathema, an Establishment sort of thing to do. These kids just don't want to start immediately on a nine-to-five job."
Many students will therefore treat themselves to Wanderjahre, living frugaily on handouts from home or picking up odd jobs. Or they may join communes, which are a practical way for unsettled idealists to live on next to nothing. Others, while still in college, will try to line up what are usually called "alternative" jobs, meaning jobs that suit the new alternative lifestyle. In some college placement offices there are folders containing information about how the kids can get into dome building, blacksmithing, pipefitting or free-school teaching. At Oberlin, there is even an "alternatives" office, staffed by ten volunteer students, and several other colleges and universities have appointed "alternative vocations placement counselors." A graduate divinity student named Robert J. Ginn Jr. has the job at Harvard; he estimates that perhaps a fourth of this year's senior class are seriously considering going into some alternate vocation.
One of them is Henry Adams, the great-grandnephew of the author of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. Instead of writing about stained glass, the most recent Adams to graduate from Harvard intends to go into the craft itself, making skylights and glass sections for geodesic domes.* Ross Coppelman, a Harvard '70 English major, is making a variable but decent enough living as a silversmith on Cape Cod, while a 1970 Wisconsin graduate in anthropology is quietly living on a New York State farm, making harpsichords for sale. The income from a career in the crafts may be uncertain, but it is not necessarily low. Blacksmiths can make more than $10,000 a year, and according to one careful computation, a toolmaker today can net more in his lifetime than a judge. It is not, of course, the pay that attracts youth to the crafts; it is a chance to be autonomous and to have time "to look inside themselves," as one explains it.
Alternative careers also include (mostly low paying) with a basic commitment to service or to social change. At Duke, alternatives placement is primarily involved in informing students about such organizations as VISTA, the Peace Corps and the Teacher Corps (which still attract about 15,000 people of all ages annually and are being melded into one organization called the Action Corps), and the Office of Economic Opportunity. At Michigan State University, which runs the nation's biggest college placement operation, all 1,200 copies of each issue of its Vocations for Social Change newsletter are eagerly snapped up. It advertises openings for such jobs as organizers to work with sugar-cane laborers in Louisiana ($70 a week) and a female counselor at Washington, D.C.'s Runaway House ($50 a week plus rent). There was also one offer last fall from a retired accountant in Far Rockaway, N.Y., who wanted to finance two "real drop-outs" in starting a combination school and commune.
Circulation of Elites
The trend raises some serious questions about the future of the U.S. economy and indeed U.S. society; what will happen if millions of youths turn against the material rewards and the competitiveness that have motivated so much American progress? For the present, alternative careers appeal primarily to upper-and middle-class students, who tend to take affluence for granted. Children from blue-collar backgrounds, often the first in their families to go to college, are more often satisfied with conventional jobs; moreover, they need them. This circumstance has led Sociologists Peter and Brigitte Berger to suggest that if what Charles Reich calls "the greening of America" goes on apace, it may shade into a "blueing of America."
If middle-class youth drop out from the pursuit of influence and affluence, the children of the blue-collar workers may become the new professional class. "Should Yale become hopelessly 'greened.' Wall Street will get used to recruits from Fordham or Wichita State," say the Bergers. To a limited extent, this "circulation of elites" has already begun. This is due, however, not only to America's greening, but also to a conscious effort by Establishment institutions to open more doors. This year, for example, medical schools have accepted a more representative cross section of applicants than ever before.
Disturbing Dislocation
English majors pumping gas. Would-be engineers on assembly lines. Prospective social workers on welfare. For hundreds, perhaps even thousands of the class of '71, this disturbing dislocation may soon be reality--for a time anyway. The lagging pace of the recovery from last year's recession is only partly to blame. Just as the U.S. has begun to consider the possibility of slowing down its economic growth, so it may also have to think about scaling down its educational system, or at least changing its direction.
A number of radical education experts argue that the U.S. has become an overtrained society, producing too many specialists for too few jobs. Every year, more and more people enter colleges or universities; in fact, the number of American students currently exceeds the entire population of Switzerland. Yet 80% of all jobs available in the U.S. are within the capabilities of those with high school diplomas. "Even in periods of continued economic growth," says a recent report of the Commission on Human Resources and Advanced Education, "more than a fourth of the college graduates would be available to upgrade the educational level of occupations." What this means, in plain English, is that even without a recession, 25% of all graduates will be working at jobs for which a college education is not needed at all.
Dirty Work Movement
Whatever the faults of the U.S. educational system, it also has its glories. It made possible the miracles of modern technology and trained the scientists who sent man to the moon. For more students than any other nation can claim, it has provided the true Aristotelian education--"an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity." But the system seems out of kilter with reality. What can be done about it? Colleges and students must realize that education is something entirely apart from insurance for a status job. This is particularly true of the liberal arts, which in their proper perspective are intended to instill wisdom and discernment, rather than specific knowledge that can later be traded in for a paycheck. Says Kansas Vice Chancellor Balfour: "Many people are at the university for the wrong reasons--because it gives them a different image than if they were to become mechanics or carpenters."
Balfour also maintains, "We've got to make ordinary work more respectable." In the current issue of Sodal Policy, M.I.T.'s Herbert J. Gans contemplates very ordinary work indeed. He presents a whimsical scenario for a Dirty Work Movement, which raises the pay of toilet cleaners and other menial laborers to $20 an hour, creating a new economic elite. As a result, everyone wants to go into dirty work, and the D.W.M. sets up educational prerequisites and a licensing system to keep out clean workers. Hippies even start wearing white shirts to express their sympathies for the new underclass.
President Nixon has tried to dignify menial work by exhortations. Although his choice of examples may have been unfortunate, he had a valid point when speaking about the job needs of those on welfare. He argued that there is as much dignity in scrubbing floors and emptying bedpans "as there is in any other work to be done in this country, including my own." Equally to the point was former HEW Secretary John Gardner's comment that "an excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher." Disconcerting though it may be to parents who have heavily invested in their children's educations, many of this year's graduates who are heading for alternative vocations may be on the right track.
The U.S. is still hugely productive and has an enormous potential for employment--21,741 different jobs are described in the latest U.S. Dictionary of Occupational Titles, and 82 million are working at them. But it is hard to fit man to title. As a purely practical matter, college students would be well advised to study the Labor Department's biennial Occupational Outlook Handbook, the mainstay of any careers counselor. It points out, for example, that the elementary-teaching field threatens to become overcrowded, but the outlook is better for teachers of the handicapped and of children in both urban ghettos and rural districts. It also describes other kinds of work like oceanography, which will be used to explore sea mines, to prevent pollution and damage caused by waves and tides, and to improve methods of getting food from the oceans.
On a broader level, there should be better effort made to coordinate information about where jobs are available. Concerned with the high youth unemployment rate (about 17%), this spring's White House Conference on Youth proposed commissioning an agency like NASA to develop a huge computerized network of job information. Guidance counselors in schools and colleges, who have wandered far afield (some even giving students therapy), should also quite literally get back to work. "The decline in demand for teachers started five years ago," complains a senior at Northeastern. "Someone should have warned us." There are already new efforts along this line, and some school systems, trying to do their utmost, are proudly announcing vocational guidance even in their kindergartens.
Channeling the Intake
In a fierce satire on the post-industrial society called Towards Helhaven, Philosopher-Critic Kenneth Burke proposed a Government lottery of two-year-olds to decide which of them will be unemployed when they grow up. Those who are selected will not have to bother with school at all. Satire aside, a plausible case can be made that the Government should try to predict the future manpower needs for every occupation, and then channel the intake into universities, discipline by discipline. This kind of massive educational planning is done to various extents in Communist countries, as well as in Sweden and France.
To a nation as committed to freedom of choice as the U.S., the very idea seems repellent. Yet what the U.S. now has may be even worse: economic manipulation of the manpower market without adequate long-range planning. The buildup of the scientists and engineers after Sputnik was accomplished at considerable public expense with grants to students and universities from dozens of Government agencies. The carrot, not the stick, filled the graduate schools with young scientists--and then to their dismay and confusion, the carrot was withdrawn.
There are other considerations as well.
The costs to the nation for graduate education are now enormously greater than undergraduate costs. Might it not be advisable to prune the specialist superstructure and use the money to expand community colleges? Would not clearer priorities dictate improving urban public schools?
It is widely assumed that more education leads to greater productivity. Not necessarily. In Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery, Sociologist Ivar Berg studied the performance of workers in the light of their education and concluded that schooling often leads to less productivity in work, not more. Nonetheless, rampant diplomaism continues to be a national disease. Business and Government alike insist upon unnecessary credentials on the part of job applicants. This not only creates a new caste of unemployables--the luckless but qualified people who lack the right degree--but it tends to confuse the real mission of education.
Career Courses First
While employers could do much to counter the tyranny of diplomaism, colleges and universities could do even more to refine their own goals and purposes. One of the most cogent proposals for an academic rethinking of the relationship between school and work was recently made by a task force on higher education headed by Frank Newman, Stanford's associate director of university relations. Among other things, it recommended that women should be able to take career courses first, so that they can work at least part time during their child-rearing years and return later for their liberal arts studies. All students in fact ought to be encouraged to enter and leave college according to their needs. When suitable, classes should be conducted by practitioners outstanding in their jobs and not just by professional teachers. There should also be many more internships, apprenticeships and work-study programs. "Kids don't know what they want to do," said one father, "because they've never done anything."
They do know, however, what they don't want--schooling that does not seem to fit their ambitions, their careers, their goals. Among the first protesters were the intelligent students who became dropouts, turned off by the meaninglessness of much they had been exposed to. At first, few academics listened to their complaints, but they pay heed now. It is shocking but nonetheless true that the majority of those who enter college never graduate. Many of them may drop out for the wrong reasons, out of impatience or self-indulgence. But so massive a disaffection--so large a gap between classroom and job, schooling and life--cannot be met merely with the old incantations about hard work and discipline. Education in the U.S. has been called its secular religion; from all signs it is ripe for a reformation.
* Rather like Cary Grant in the 1938 movie Holiday, who explained to his future father-in-law: "It's always been my idea to make a few thousand early in the game if I could, and then quit for as long as they last and try to find out who I am and what I am and what goes on and what about it--now, while I'm young."
* It was John Adams, great-grandfather of the author, who wrote in 1780: "I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy ... in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." He did not forecast the next curriculum.
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