Education: Graduates and Jobs: A Grave New World

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diplomaism continues to be a national disease. Business and Government alike insist upon unnecessary credentials on the part of job applicants. This not only creates a new caste of unemployables—the luckless but qualified people who lack the right degree—but it tends to confuse the real mission of education.

Career Courses First

While employers could do much to counter the tyranny of diplomaism, colleges and universities could do even more to refine their own goals and purposes. One of the most cogent proposals for an academic rethinking of the relationship between school and work was recently made by a task force on higher education headed by Frank Newman, Stanford's associate director of university relations. Among other things, it recommended that women should be able to take career courses first, so that they can work at least part time during their child-rearing years and return later for their liberal arts studies. All students in fact ought to be encouraged to enter and leave college according to their needs. When suitable, classes should be conducted by practitioners outstanding in their jobs and not just by professional teachers. There should also be many more internships, apprenticeships and work-study programs. "Kids don't know what they want to do," said one father, "because they've never done anything."

They do know, however, what they don't want—schooling that does not seem to fit their ambitions, their careers, their goals. Among the first protesters were the intelligent students who became dropouts, turned off by the meaninglessness of much they had been exposed to. At first, few academics listened to their complaints, but they pay heed now. It is shocking but nonetheless true that the majority of those who enter college never graduate. Many of them may drop out for the wrong reasons, out of impatience or self-indulgence. But so massive a disaffection—so large a gap between classroom and job, schooling and life—cannot be met merely with the old incantations about hard work and discipline. Education in the U.S. has been called its secular religion; from all signs it is ripe for a reformation.

* Rather like Cary Grant in the 1938 movie Holiday, who explained to his future father-in-law: "It's always been my idea to make a few thousand early in the game if I could, and then quit for as long as they last and try to find out who I am and what I am and what goes on and what about it—now, while I'm young."

* It was John Adams, great-grandfather of the author, who wrote in 1780: "I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy ... in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." He did not forecast the next curriculum.