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Administrators of some four-year liberal arts colleges are also moving to prepare students better for the world of work. The College of St. Francis in Joliet, Ill., which once specialized in training teachers, has revamped its curriculum to grant degrees in nuclear medical technology and business administration. John Shingleton, placement director at Michigan State and an early critic of "impractical" education, has instituted an "executive in residence" program that brings General Motors managers to live on campus for a week with liberal-arts majors and impart to them a feeling for the "real world." Boston's Northeastern University has long been famous for its "coop" system under which students for five years alternate course work and full-time employment, on the road to a B.A. Career Services Director Frank Heuston boasts that 77% of Northeastern graduates are placed in jobs related to their skills.
Economic realities have increasingly been figuring in educational planning. Thomas Fernandez, vice president of Atlanta's Emory University, says he consults the U.S. Department of Labor before counseling students. Says he: "You can't crystal-ball it. If we graduate 15,000 chemical engineers every four years, we want to be sure that down the road, chemical engineering is where it's at." Every two-year community college in New York State has an advisory panel of industry officials to assist in creating curriculums or practicing academic contraception if a program produces graduates for whom there are no jobs. More and more, undergraduates are being urged to make career choices early, to keep an eye on the marketplace, and, if they must major in the humanities, to minor in a business field or at least learn to take shorthand.
The vocational bent in higher education has obvious pitfalls. "This whole business of trying to pick a major to match a job is just Russian roulette," says Harvard's Freeman. Today's "hot" fields—engineering or accounting, for example—could be glutted in a few years much as aerospace science, the glamour field of the early 1960s, fell fallow by the decade's end. Besides, asks Herbert Salinger, director of career planning at Berkeley: "Should we turn someone off to a field that really interests him" because job prospects are slim?
Many educators agree with James R. Gass, head of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's educational-research arm: "Educational action to prepare for work and active life should aim less at training young people to practice a given trade or profession than at equipping them to adapt themselves to a variety of jobs." According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the typical American changes his job seven times during his lifetime, and his career three times. Francis Fisher, director of Harvard's career services office, goes further, arguing that "we must break the assumption that the purpose of education is to prepare for work." He and other educators contend that liberal-arts training, whatever its salability in the job market, is a necessary resource in a civilized society.