'Cliffe Has Business Course With Accent on Practicality

Harvard Business School is one of the few remaining branches of the University not open to women. But career-minded local lasses can take a practical business training course without crossing the town line. Radcliffe's Management Training Program, the only Annex course not administered by Harvard faculty, has for 13 years offered a ten-month introduction to office management.

Set up in the fall of 1937 "to bridge the gap between liberal arts education and professional work" the course has turned out 316 graduates, who net an average salary of $3,000 to $5,000 a year. Top earners make about $7,000. The program is administered by two directors--T. North Whitehead and Mrs. Ragnhild J. Roberts.

Like the Harvard Business School the Management Training Program uses case studies, but the Radcliffe curriculum goes a step further in applying the practical case method. The Annex program combines seven months of classes with two "field work" periods when the student takes a job.

After a month of studies each trainee takes a four-week job, selected to acquaint her with unskilled work in some commercial observation. These jobs have included scrubbing floors in a hospital, lugging lumber about in a door factory in Pittsburgh, putting heels on rubber boots, and packing candy at Brigham's.

Basic Training

The basic program is meant to season the trainee and prepares her for a second round of courses.

"Our students find that they are better equipped to understand and deal with workers after they have held the worker's type of non-specialized job," co-director. Mrs. Roberts explained. "The best way to appreciate the endurance and difficulty of the lowest paid job is to hold one," she continued. "We follow the theory that often a person finds he learns more about the functioning of an organization when working at the lower level, than he does when employed in a white collar job."

Results of the field work period are well documented and all students may benefit from varied reactions to the program. Students write a confidential report on the student, and the student tells her experiences to her classmates. "This way each girl gets the benefit of about 70 job experiences by the time the course is completed," Mrs. Roberts explained.

It Isn't Feminine

From November to March classes are resumed. Such unfeminine subjects as problems in marketing, the use of graphs and statistics, retail distribution, public administration, and the accounting process are studied.

Then 100 firms cooperate with the propram in placing the girls temporarily. Trainees are sent to a variety of enterprises including the American Thread Company, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Broadcasting Company, and the Central National Bank of Cleveland.

Second term field work period jobs are on the managerial level. They have proved, however, to have hectic potentialities. One girl expected that she would find less physical stress on her second job, only to find that she had been assigned supervisor of Filene's Basement.

Another trainee acted as assistant housekeeper at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston; a third had to write an instruction course for insurance company employees.

Think Worthwhile

Graduates have proved, in general, to be firm supporters of the course. Over 90 percent have written to the annual program newsletters telling how much they enjoy their respective jobs.

The directors also consider the program a success. "Our greatest problem," complained Mrs. Roberts, "is recruiting, since surprisingly few girls consider going into business administration. Despite a campaign of brochures sent to most American women's colleges, most students still claim that they learned about the course from friends."

In spite of their commercial interests M.P.T.'s do not concentrate solely on successful business careers. Fifty-four percent of graduates are married.