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Conclusion: College and the Culture of Aspiration
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Conclusion College and the Culture of Aspiration In 1920 the Saturday Evening Post continued to ponder the essential question that had initially inspired the interest in college education more than twenty years before, when it asked “Do Opportunities Still Exist?” And at first glance, it seemed that the traditional self-made man still reigned supreme . In this specific article, the prolific Post writer Albert W. Atwood trumpeted the fact (in his opinion) that “the self-made man, the man who has risen from the ranks, is the type that permeates modern industry in this country.” Corporations had not killed opportunity; they had just slightly altered the conditions in which men could rise. America’s democratic ladder of opportunity remained stronger than ever. A closer scrutiny of the examples Atwood offered in his article, however, while not disproving the claims of democratic opportunity , certainly testified to the fact that these were not their fathers’ self-made men. Atwood did note several clerks and shop hands that had ascended to high executive office, but college graduates and sons of owners formed a conspicuously large presence among the list of self-made examples. Six sons of Gustavus Swift sat on the board of Western Electric, although Atwood emphasized that each one had to earn his place. More significantly, though, the majority of business executives he noted had gone to college, and he again highlighted that these college graduates had worked their way through the organization. He even featured AT&T’s method of training managers by shifting them through 181 menial jobs in several departments, but he glossed over the fact that the company recruited most of these trainees directly off college campuses rather than from among their own pool of clerks and workers.1 Atwood’s article exemplified how the mass media worked to recast the mythology of the self-made man for a new age, crafting new “self-made” trajectories to power. By the 1920s, the corporate canvassing of college campuses had begun in earnest. The Post, for one, had long commented on such practices, but after 1920 systematic recruitment of college graduates by corporations became widespread, as did special management-training programs designed for the college graduate. Atwood himself penned an in-depth look at the phenomenon in “Impatient Youth in the Business World.” After first offering the typical criticisms often lodged against the college-bred in business—expecting too rapid a rise, Atwood placed some of the blame on the companies themselves, who employed recruiters in a fierce competition for graduates. He also noted and endorsed the trend among the major corporations (Bell Telephone was cited as the model) to erect special executive training programs distinctly for college graduates. The reason?—the growing opinion that the college man needed more challenges and stimulation than the noncollege man he worked alongside .2 College men were like gifted children, who withered if not intellectually challenged. Why did businessmen even care? What made the college man suddenly so precious? Another article, A. H. Deute’s “When the College Senior Becomes a Business Freshman,” articulated the prime rationale informing these changes. The college man’s value came not from any immediate skills he brought as a new hire; he still had to learn from experience. It was what he could bring as an executive at the age of thirty-five, owing to his “broad education.” His mental training made him at first an “efficient cog in the machine,” but through his “imagination, sound judgment, [and] a capacity for clear thinking,” he would one day work “up to a big position.”3 And as Atwood, Deute and many other writers and business contributors to the magazines observed in the 1920s, businesses were eager for college men to serve as the lieutenants and junior officers of an expanding corporate America. Such language should sound very familiar. Such articles reported on a solidifying business reality, one that the mass magazines had helped to define and one that they would continue to augment and refine in the 1920s. But much of the magazine’s enormous cultural impact in shaping Americans’ collegiate expectations evades obvious detection if one relies solely on the magazines’ attention to college-related subjects in the 1920s. One does not find the obvious infatuation with the college man or college life that earlier had gripped popular magazines. One still found the ideal college 182 Conclusion E [3.236.247.213] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:47 GMT) man in every element of the magazines, but college...