INTO THE HARNESS

Dean Donham's address to second-year men of the Business School yesterday, expressing as it did the optimistic prediction that practically all of this year's graduating class will be placed in jobs by the School employment bureau, bears definite indication of the importance now laid on professionalized training. A second conclusion is that there is a need today for highly trained men at a time when business in general is dull. Present conditions of course influence the number of employment opportunities; and yet the general trend toward specialized business training is of longer standing than the present slump.

Statistics of Harvard Seniors reveal that while medicine, teaching, and law have claimed on an average 50 per cent of a class, 25 per cent of the Seniors enter some kind of business. Of the Class of 1932, only 8 per cent have jobs promised them after graduation, according to the Alumni Placement Service.

The fact that the Business School can assure its second-year class of positions after graduation is not necessarily indicative of any demand for highly trained executives in the business world today. Dean Donham urges men to accept the positions as offered, foregoing hopes and ambitions for high salaries. But it Business School men, trained two years longer than college graduates, are being urged to content themselves with modest positions, men unable to do graduate work must look forward to an uninspiring future.

Despite growing sentiment in favor of graduate work as a means of obtaining satisfactory employment, the Alumni Placement Bureau still has a great chance to fit the 'mere' college graduate to suitable employment. Specialized training is of little use to those who in actual practice fail to reach the heights of business procedure. Those who consider a graduate school degree as an open sesame to responsible positions should remember that the rise to such positions is governed by forces created in earlier training, and in college. Emphasis for college alumni who omit Graduate School work should be placed on a correlation of the man to the job, rather than of the man's training to the job. In this way, the College senior, who appears to be prepared for nothing, can increase his chances of obtaining a position.