The Organization Man

CHAPTER 8 Business Influence on Education

Business Influence on Education cHAPTER 8 Business Influence on Education 101 IN THIS CHAPTER I WOULD LIKE TO BRING INTO SHARPER FOCUS THE part business is playing in these educational changes. Business has been only one of many influences, but it is going to become a great deal more important in the years ahead. Simply by virtue of the changing economics of university financing, the organization man is going to be much more than an alumnus. As overseer of the corporation's fund giving, he is becoming a sort of extra trustee of education. What he thinks about education, whether we agree with it or not, is a matter of some moment. This brings us to an interesting anomaly. Lately, leaders of U.S. business have been complaining that there are nowhere near enough "generalists." The average management man, they have been declaring, has been far too narrowly educated. One company , the Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania, feels so strongly on this it has been detaching some of its most promising middle-management men to the University of Pennsylvania for a year of special study in the humanities. But this, executives concede. is a stopgap measure: it is the kind of education a trainee should have gotten in the first place. Give us the well-rounded man, business leaders are saying to the colleges, the man steeped in fundamentals ; we will give him the specialized knowledge he needs. Convention after convention they make this plea-and their own recruiters go right on doing what they've been doing: demanding more specialists. This does not spring from bad faith. The top man may be perfectly sincere in asking for the man with a broad view-he might even be a liberal arts man himself. Somewhere along the line, however, this gets translated and retranslated by the organization people, so that by the time the company gets down to cases the specifications for its officer candidates are something quite different. 102 THE ORGANIZATION MAN Nobody knows this better than college placement directors. Every year the order sheet that corporation recruiters bring to the campus has been increasingly loaded against the liberal arts major. Five years ago we checked placement directors of eighty colleges to make up a cumulative listing of the different majors that recruiters were asking for. Out of every hundred jobs offered, it turned out, all but a handful were for men with vocational degrees. "What recruiters want," as one placement director explained, "goes in this order: (first) specialists, (second) specialists with some liberal education on the side, (third) any college graduate, (fourth) liberal arts graduates." Most of all, corporations have wanted engineers; they have wanted them so badly that recruiters, normally a friendly lot with one another, have competed for the available supply with every trick in the book. Year by year the bias against the liberal arts has deepened. In 1950, to cite one of the most preferred of liberal arts colleges, some sixty-six manufacturing companies reserved interviewing space at Yale. Twenty-eight per cent of these companies at least mentioned that they might have a position for a liberal arts student. The next year, ninety-one manufacturing companies reserved interviewing space, but this time only 16 per cent even mentioned an interest in seeing liberal arts students. In 1952, out of 117 manufacturing companies only 14 per cent indicated interest. In other colleges the same trend was manifest. When we re-queried placement directors in 1953, one half reported that companies were demanding more specialists than before; of the few that reported less demand, several explained that it was only because recruiters were resigned to accepting some liberal arts men as a stopgap. Between 1953 and 1956, the number of business speeches bewailing overspecialization increased. So did the demand for specialists. Out of sheer lack of enough candidates for the maw, the recruiters do get around to the liberal arts man these days, but it is only a stopgap measure. Relatively speaking, the liberal arts man remains in the cellar. About the only kind of a job he is seriously considered for at the outset is sales work, and others regard this as a dog job offered people unqualified for anything else. If he still doesn't get the point, the salary differential should drive it home; with very few exceptions he is offered less money than his classmates who majored in business administration or engineering. (In Business Influence on Education 103 1956 the average going...