Caroline Bird

The case for college has been accepted without question for more than a generation. All high school graduates ought to go, says Conventional Wisdom and statistical evidence, because college will help them earn more money, become “better” people, and learn to be more responsible citizens than those who don't go.

But college has never been able to work its magic for everyone. And now that close to half our high school graduates are attending, those who don't fit the pattern are becoming more numerous, and more obvious. College graduates are selling shoes and driving taxis; college students sabotage each other's experiments and forge letters of recommendation in the intense competition for admission to graduate school. Others find no stimulation in their studies, and drop out – often encouraged by college administrators.

Some observers say the fault is with the young people them­selves – they are spoiled, stoned, overindulged, and expecting too much. But that's mass character assassination, and doesn't explain all campus unhappiness. Others blame the state of the world, and they are partly right. We've been told that young people have to go to college because our economy can't absorb an army of un­trained eighteen-year-olds. But disillusioned graduates are learning that it can no longer absorb an army of trained twenty-two-year-olds, either.

Some adventuresome educators and campus watchers have openly begun to suggest that college may not be the best, the proper, the only place for every young person after the completion of high school. We may have been looking at all those surveys and statistics upside down, it seems, and through the rosy glow of our own remembered college experiences. Perhaps college doesn't make people intelligent, ambitious, happy, liberal, or quick to learn new things – maybe it's just the other way around, and intelligent, ambitious, happy, liberal, and quick-learning people are merely the ones who have been attracted to college in the first place. And perhaps all those successful college graduates would have been successful whether they had gone to college or not. This is heresy to those of us who have been brought up to believe that if a little schooling is good, more has to be much better. But contrary evidence is beginning to mount up….

Students tell us the same thing college counselors tell us – they go because of pressure from parents and teachers, and stay because it seems to be an alternative to a far worse fate. It's “better” than the Army or a dead-end job, and it has to be pretty bad before it's any worse than staying at home.

College graduates say that they don't want to work “just” for the money: They want work that matters. They want to help people and save the world. But the numbers are stacked against them. Not only are there not enough jobs in world-saving fields, but in the current slowdown it has become evident that there never were, and probably never will be, enough jobs requiring higher education to go around.

Students who tell their advisers they want to help people, for example, are often directed to psychology. This year the Depart­ment of Labor estimates that there will be 4, 300 new jobs for psychologists, while colleges will award 58, 430 bachelor's degrees in psychology.

Sociology has become a favorite major on socially conscious campuses, but graduates find that social reform is hardly a paying occupation. Male sociologists from the University of Wisconsin reported as gainfully employed a year after graduation included a legal assistant, sports editor, truck unloader, Peace Corps worker, publications director, and a stockboy – but no sociologist per se. The highest paid worked for the post office.

Publishing, writing, and journalism are.presumably the voca­tional goal of a large proportion of the 104, 000 majors in Communi­cations and Letters expected to graduate in 1975. The outlook for them is grim. All of the daily newspapers in the country combined are expected to hire a total of 2, 600 reporters this year. Radio and television stations may hire a total of 500 announcers, most of them in local radio stations. Nonpublishing organizations will need 1, 100 technical writers, and public-relations activities another 4, 400. Even if new graduates could get all these jobs (they can't, of course), over 90, 000 of them will have to find something less glamorous to do.

Other fields most popular with college graduates are also pa­thetically small. Only 1, 900 foresters a year will be needed during this decade, although schools of forestry are expected to continue graduating twice that many. Some will get sub-professional jobs as forestry aides. Schools of architecture are expected to turn out twice as many as will be needed and while all sorts of people want to design things, the Department of Labor forecasts that there will be jobs for only 400 new industrial designers a year. As for anthro­pologists, only 400 will be needed every year in the 1970s lo take care of all the college courses, public-health research, community surveys, museums, and all the archaeological digs on every conti­nent. (For these jobs graduate work in anthropology is required.)...

Whatever college graduates want to do, most of them are going to wind up doing what there is to do. During the next few years, ac­cording to the Labor Department, the biggest demand will be for stenographers and secretaries, followed by retail-trade salesworkers, hospital attendants, bookkeepers, building custodians, registered nurses, foremen, kindergarten and elementary-school teachers, re­ceptionists, cooks, cosmetologists, private-household workers, manu­facturing inspectors, and industrial machinery repairmen. These are the jobs which will eventually absorb the surplus archaeolo­gists, urban planners, oceanographers, sociologists, editors, and college professors.

Vocationalism is the new look on campus because of the dis­couraging job market faced by the generalists. Students have been opting for medicine and law in droves. If all those who check “doctor” as their career goal succeed in getting their MDs, we'll immediately have ten times the target ratio of doctors for the population of the United States. Law schools are already graduating twice as many new lawyers every year as the Department of Labor thinks we will need, and the oversupply grows annually.

Specialists often find themselves at the mercy of shifts in de­mand, and the narrower the vocational training, the more risky the long-term prospects. Engineers are the classic example of the “Yo-Yo” effect in supply and demand. Today's shortage is apt to produce a big crop of engineering graduates after the need has crested, and teachers face the same squeeze.

Worse than that, when the specialists turn up for work, they often find that they have learned a lot of things in classrooms that they will never use, that they will have to learn a lot of things on the job that they were never taught, and that most of what they have learned is less likely to “come in handy later” than to fade from memory. One disillusioned architecture student, who had already designed and built houses, said, “It's the degree you need, not every­thing you learn getting it.”

A diploma saves the employer the cost of screening candi­dates and gives him a predictable product: He can assume that those who have survived the four-year ordeal have learned how to manage themselves. They have learned how to budget their time, meet deadlines, set priorities, cope with impersonal authority, fol­low instructions, and stick with a task that may be tiresome without direct supervision….