Sink or Swim Is Motto of Placement Office

Do you want a job in South America making women's bathing suits? Or would you prefer to be a casket salesman for a Boston funeral parlor?

Either way, the Office of Student Placement in Weld Hall guarantees you the inside story on how to get the job.

Now in its sixth year, the office is the College's latest in a line reaching back to 1898, the year of the Harvard Appointments Committee. This committee had the job of: "recommending for positions of various kinds, men who are studying or have studied under the Faculty."

From 1908 to 1935, placement after graduation was an alumni responsibility. Then the University took it over, and has carried out its functions ever since, except for the war periods.

Placement operations have expanded enormously since the Committee days. Since 1945 the present office has placed well over 2,000 graduating seniors in big business jobs, or in government departments. Thousands more have been given help in finding jobs for themselves.

The office has sent some men out to build oil refineries in India for Standard Vacuum: some to work on secret government prospects at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory; others to executive jobs in department stores like Macy's, and still others to designing helicopters for Bell Aircraft.

Sometimes though, the office cannot satisfy employers. For example, one Mid-Western manufacturer of ladies' underwear, has for years past asked for graduates from the College to do sales work for him. Many lingerie-minded students have tried for the job, but all have failed. They never met the apparently vital specification that they be between five foot ten and six feet one tall.

Despite the exotic requests of some employers, "Placements is a little more than getting a job," says John W. Teele, the office's present director, and also the University's Director of Personnel. "Our idea of good placement is that it follows from the right kind of counselling. A possible objective for us might be to try and place the whole of our graduating class. But I think the most important standard to aim at, is the qualitative one does the man like his job?"

Many critics, from employers to students, disagree with this whole approach. They say the success of a placement policy stands or falls by the quantity of men it gets placed. They point approving fingers at mid-Western colleges like Chicago or Michigan where placement agencies often boast getting jobs for 100 percent of the graduating class.

Teele thinks much of this statistics' argument is 'hocus-pocus.' "How can you always tell whether a placement office has put the man in the job or not?" he asks. By way of demonstrating his point, he tells the story of a student whom he once referred for a job to the "Boston Herald." The "Herald" interviewer sent him to a friend at the "Boston Globe." The "Globe" man thought the student had great potentialities and tried to find him a job with a publisher. The publisher had no openings, but remembered a friend on another Boston paper. This was the man who finally hired the student.

"If we can call that placement," says Teele, "then perhaps we can claim to place everybody."

Not on a Platter

Alexander Clark, assistant director of the office, thinks the "100-percenters" are wrong, but for different-reasons. He asks the basic question: "Are you going to spoon-feed your man with a lot of jobs that you hand to him on a platter, or are you going to train him so he can go out and find a job for himself?"

Furthermore, students here are mostly liberal arts majors, and only in a few cases get the specialized training that forms the back-bone of study at many colleges. They therefore find that fields like accountancy, electronics, or advertising, are closed to them unless they take special training courses. More important, they start off knowing little or nothing about what work they will have to do in such fields.

Spoon-feeding, Clark feels, is way out of line with Harvard's whole teaching tradition. "From the day a man gets here," he says, "he is told he will have to turn himself into a tough-minded, independent thinker. He starts going to his courses and finds his only big 'must' is being present at examinations. He must arrange his whole home-work schedule himself, as well as almost everything else he does."

Why then, Clark asks, should the placement office have to tell students what jobs to take or not to take. "It all boils down," he says, "to whether you believe in the 'directive' or 'non-directive' approach."

Clark's 'non-direction' adds up to a great deal of hard work on the part of the student. Basically, it means he will have to find the company or other organization for which he ends up working on his own. Clark and his staff will set the man on the right road, but will leave finding the right address to him.

Many critics think this "self-service" counselling demands too much of the student. They feel a placement office should size up a man, tell him into what work he should go, and then end up finding his job for him.

Students, themselves, write in many irate letters to complain that the office puts too little emphasis on specific placement. One student sent such a letter last September. He charged that the office was over-staffed--it has four graduates of girls' college, in addition to Clark--and its methods were useless. He came in later, however, and after working for two months with the same methods, landed a 'plum' job.

Many alumni feel the same way as the student critics, they ask why the College cannot do so much placing as Yale does, and enviously point to the Yale Club of New York, which employs a full-time official to hunt jobs for graduates.

Some Employers Opposed

Many employers are dubious too. J.E. Smith, employment manager for the Armstrong Cork Company of Lancaster, Penn, is one. Basically, he thinks that college placement offices like Harvard's, make recruiting for companies impractical.

Smith writers: "Comparatively few companies can justify conducting interviews with all interested candidates individually. They do not have sufficient personnel requirements to do so." He would like to see two big improvements on the Harvard system; first "the use of standardized student application forms, and second, "an adequate alumni placement service, that can bring an alumnus and his job into focus through personal discussion and re-evaluation of his position ... and thereby assist materially in reducing useless and costly turnover for both the alumnus and the company."

Clark admits his office puts comparatively little emphasis on job-getting. But he thinks the tools and information he offers students eventually become far more valuable to them than a job. Even so, he feels that Harvard's placing facilities, such as its arranging of company interviews, and its enormous business contacts, compare well with those of other colleges.

Scoffers Becoming Fewer

He thinks that if students go elsewhere, it is because they have not used the office correctly. For instance, he keeps a large bulletin board covered with several hundred notices of job openings. The sole purpose of the board is to give students a rough idea of what jobs are being offered, and incoming men are specifically advised not to use it for other reasons. Yet one student came to the office almost daily last summer, and read the board to find a job. Seeing a company he liked, he would at once ask Clark to arrange an interview for him. He would then go to see his potential employer, knowing no more than his name and address. Inevitably, he never landed a job. After spending three futile months, this way, he finally left the office, blaming its policies for all his failures.

Clark thinks that companies are beginning to realize that his self-counselling approach pays off. He attributes this to his letting students work out their own problems, and also to his evaluating their personal ability and liking for a job.

"From the company's standpoint." Clark says, "this means its personnel men can rely on their Harvard recruits turning out happy in their jobs, and not wanting to leave as soon as they find out what is expected of them--something that men often do only at the end of an expensive company training course."

This job contentment appears to be in sharp contrast to what happens at some colleges. For example, Michigan's placement bureau says it has a bigger alumni than undergraduate program. Clark thinks this "raises the suspicion" that a great many of those placed don't like the jobs they got. It also implies they never did enough thinking on job-getting while they were in college, and so have to go back to their old college placement office.

The University has a strong supporter of its ideas in Princeton, Gordon C. Sikes, director of the bureau there, says: "Most of the men registered with us use the Bureau as a source of information only. For example, we can count on 40 percent of each Senior class going to graduate school. We have about 700 seniors on year, and probably half of these men use the Bureau either for possible lead or for the active job of interviewing.

Fine Library

Sikes concludes: "We have a feeling that we help a good many men, and the most seniors appreciate the service of bureau such as this. Certainly they a present in the office in great number throughout the year."

The only difference between the Harvard and the Princeton office lies in the bigger facilities of the Weld Hall office. Most impressive of all is its information library. Clark claims this has not on the biggest collection of data on individual companies in the country, but also the "most comprehensive literature on jobs "in departments of our government this side of Washington.

This library is where students do most of the real work in their job-hunting program. Having chosen their general field, they may hunt through hundred of individual folders searching for the "one and only" company.

When they have found it, they may feel they want some inside information on the organization. They may then go to consult any one of 300 special alumni advisers, scattered all over the country and representing nearly all business and professional occupations.

Students get help in making their choices from the series of career conferences sponsored by the office each year. Next spring, for example, prominent speakers will come to talk on jobs in government, journalism and writing, foreign nations, public relations and advertising, and many other fields.

Nobody so far has seriously questioned that most students here need the help the office can give them. As the placement office report for 1946-7 says: "Our early comment on seniors just graduating was that they were often ignorant even of the language of business, and had little useful knowledge of the ways and means of making a living. Consequently the problem of getting a job seems to most of them a complex and difficult one."

Clark, though, has good news for those who work conscientiously through his programs: "The man who really applies himself," he says, "will get to know so much about his field, and about the company he wants to work for, that when the time comes for the interview, he will be an accomplished self-salesman.