Education: Graduates and Jobs: A Grave New World

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described in the latest U.S. Dictionary of Occupational Titles, and 82 million are working at them. But it is hard to fit man to title. As a purely practical matter, college students would be well advised to study the Labor Department's biennial Occupational Outlook Handbook, the mainstay of any careers counselor. It points out, for example, that the elementary-teaching field threatens to become overcrowded, but the outlook is better for teachers of the handicapped and of children in both urban ghettos and rural districts. It also describes other kinds of work like oceanography, which will be used to explore sea mines, to prevent pollution and damage caused by waves and tides, and to improve methods of getting food from the oceans.

On a broader level, there should be better effort made to coordinate information about where jobs are available. Concerned with the high youth unemployment rate (about 17%), this spring's White House Conference on Youth proposed commissioning an agency like NASA to develop a huge computerized network of job information. Guidance counselors in schools and colleges, who have wandered far afield (some even giving students therapy), should also quite literally get back to work. "The decline in demand for teachers started five years ago," complains a senior at Northeastern. "Someone should have warned us." There are already new efforts along this line, and some school systems, trying to do their utmost, are proudly announcing vocational guidance even in their kindergartens.

Channeling the Intake

In a fierce satire on the post-industrial society called Towards Helhaven, Philosopher-Critic Kenneth Burke proposed a Government lottery of two-year-olds to decide which of them will be unemployed when they grow up. Those who are selected will not have to bother with school at all. Satire aside, a plausible case can be made that the Government should try to predict the future manpower needs for every occupation, and then channel the intake into universities, discipline by discipline. This kind of massive educational planning is done to various extents in Communist countries, as well as in Sweden and France.

To a nation as committed to freedom of choice as the U.S., the very idea seems repellent. Yet what the U.S. now has may be even worse: economic manipulation of the manpower market without adequate long-range planning. The buildup of the scientists and engineers after Sputnik was accomplished at considerable public expense with grants to students and universities from dozens of Government agencies. The carrot, not the stick, filled the graduate schools with young scientists—and then to their dismay and confusion, the carrot was withdrawn.

There are other considerations as well.

The costs to the nation for graduate education are now enormously greater than undergraduate costs. Might it not be advisable to prune the specialist superstructure and use the money to expand community colleges? Would not clearer priorities dictate improving urban public schools?

It is widely assumed that more education leads to greater productivity. Not necessarily. In Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery, Sociologist Ivar Berg studied the performance of workers in the light of their education and concluded that schooling often leads to less productivity in work, not more. Nonetheless, rampant