Brother, Can You Spare a Job?

Until the summer of 1945, as far as the College was concerned, the business of finding jobs for its graduates was of little importance. A student left Cambridge with a shiny new degree in one hand, and the problem of what to do with it in the other. Although the bulk of Harvard graduates traditionally have found good employment, the lack of University employment guidance of the sort furnished by many other colleges became noticeable in recent years, and with the creation of the Office of Student Placement in 1945 an effort was made to answer the need. This office has done much, but it does not measure up to the standards set by colleges such as M.I.T. and Yale.

Today, as the Placement Bureau at Yale noted last week, "employers are becoming extremely selective." In the face of this fact, which is directly related to the increased competition inevitable in a time when more college graduates are being turned loose on American employers than ever before, the Office of Student Placement has declared that "there is no employment office as such at Harvard. Here is the core of the problem: the emphasis is placed not on helping to find specific jobs for students, not on making actual contacts between students and possible employers, but on the general principle of showing a student how to go about the business himself. In a liberal arts college, this sort of work is necessary. Helping a student discover what he himself really wants to do and what he is prepared to do forms an important part of the work of any employment office at a college such as Harvard, and with its polls and pamphlets the Office has done this thoroughly and well. At Yale, however, the Placement Bureau lays similar basic foundations, while emphasizing actual placement. In 1941, of the 213 students who went directly into business or industry, the Bureau helped place sixty percent. The Harvard Office makes no claim to anything approaching this record.

Even on the basis of its current limited set-up, the Office is understaffed. It has complained that too many men, instead of getting started during their Sophomore or Junior years, wait until a few weeks before graduating to go for a conference. But the 640 men, mostly Seniors, interviewed during the last year were about all its one Director and two Executive Secretaries could handle. If more Sophomores and Juniors are to use the facilities of the Office, which they should do if they want to reap the greatest gains, it must expand its size to absorb them. And it must also expand its aims with an eye to getting more students actual jobs, if Harvard graduates are to keep step with the horde of graduates from other colleges throughout the country.