Are College Men Wanted?
I
IF the man recently out of college or technical school is questioning, as seems to be the case, whether he wants Big Business as a lifemate, likewise is Big Business questioning whether it has done altogether well to take unto itself the college man. These questionings on both sides are more acutely to the fore during the first year or two of the union than ever afterward. If the union has not been dissolved at the end of this time, it settles down into a round of mutual adjustments that work for the fair average of content we find in the domestic ménage once the turmoil of its beginning has subsided.
As a representative of Big Business, I have often been responsible for this match. I have ‘sold’ the company to the young man graduating from college, university, or technical school; I have ‘sold’ the young man to the company. Very often I have looked back rather ruefully on my work, as a clergyman must who has performed the ceremony on an occasion whose felicitous promise is far from fulfilled. But at any rate, standing, as I did, for a number of years as a sort of buffer between the two, with Big Business pouring into one ear its objections to the college man, and the college man pouring his grievances into the other, I have learned something of the state of mind of each. It is doubtful whether here, as in marriage, to push the analogy a step further, there is more serious or widespread maladjustment than ever existed before, but parties to unhappy unions of all sorts now seek more generally to escape them. They are more vocal.
In discussing the matter not long since with a group of junior executives in a nationally known business organization, they told me that their chief executive was so set against college men in general that when, a short while before, it had seemed necessary to include a man of recent collegiate training among the advisers the president was taking with him to Europe to pass on some new project, they had deliberately selected from a number of applicants the one they thought least likely to be detected as a college man, and that only after he had won the president’s confidence had they dared reveal the young man’s background.
My own first serious thought on the objections Big Business raises to the college man came when the comptroller of the corporation with which I was connected at the time, in outlining his needs for ‘able fellows,’ capable of working up to large responsibilities, placed upon me the final injunction: ‘But no more college men — please!’
As time went on, I heard more and more often ‘No college men!’ from executives looking for young men to develop in their respective fields. What they wanted, if you pinned them down, was high-school boys. And, except where men with highly specialized training are required, boys with high-school education and nothing more can, without doubt, be more comfortably absorbed into the broad, slow-moving current of the great corporation than can men with college training — and college aspirations.
But where is Big Business to find these high-school graduates, energetic lads of first-rate intelligence, who have in them the making of future business leaders? When a lad of this sort finishes high school nowadays he goes on to college, no matter how poor his family, so much less have become the difficulties of financing a college course, what with scholarships, opportunities to work his way through in whole or in part, and the ease of negotiating a loan for the purpose. If he does go into business directly from high school, it is only for a year or two, that his earnings may help toward the coveted goal.
To cry for bright high-school boys to meet the needs of Big Business for future leaders is to cry for the moon. Whether it wants him or not, — there is no alternative, — Big Business must content itself with the college man; and, whether half-heartedly or no, the college man in ever-increasing numbers is destined, through the numerous and obvious opportunities it offers, to enter this form of union.
II
Why is it that they both find, as things now are, the early stages of an inevitable alliance so disappointing?
Rank has its privileges. Let Big Business speak first.
Its outstanding criticism, when the frailties of the college man have been aired in my hearing, is of his overweening desire to be advanced faster than his own development and the exigencies of business permit. Granting that in the long run the man with collegiate training will, other things being equal, have a decided advantage over the man without it, from the executive standpoint, no educational training whatever offers an acceptable substitute for a reasonable period of actual work in a business organization. A reasonable period. There’s the rub! In the mind of the college man it is a matter too often of months — a year or so at most. In the executive’s mind it is from two or three years to six or seven.
The college man, to be sure, has already spent four to six years of what he considers the heyday of his existence in some institution of the higher learning. Some thousands of dollars have been spent to secure this training for him. He is eager to realize on what amounts to a considerable investment. He wants to get married. How often I have put to a college man impatient with his progress the question, ‘You are engaged?’ to be answered by an affirmative. More often than not he is in debt for his college expenses. He is harassed by notes falling due to a far greater extent than the upper executive — long pasta similar struggle, if he ever knew it — is usually aware. I remember one fine young chap who went through two severe winters without an overcoat in his effort to pay back as rapidly as possible, out of his nominal starting salary, the man who had financed him through college. As likely as not, the recent graduate is both in debt and engaged. Moreover, he has developed tastes, entirely legitimate tastes, that call for money — golf, his Ford, his college club. His cultural side perhaps has been awakened; he wants to hear the best music, to enjoy the theatre, books, art.
And there are executives, though so rare as hardly to count for purposes of argument, who consider such tastes aids to the young man’s business progress. But the usual executive, who has taken up golf at forty or fifty, even sixty, and whose enjoyment of club life has been the reward of rather than the prelude to his own business activities, does not consider that an undue hardship is imposed on the college man if he must postpone any large indulgence of his sporting or social instincts until he has, in the executive’s opinion, earned a right to do so. When it comes to the college man’s possible desire to enrich himself along cultural lines, if executives, generally speaking, give this matter a thought, — which I doubt, — it is, I imagine, that culture, from their observation of its exponents, is not expensive and can be afforded by anyone so minded.
Small wonder, however, that the college man, viewing all these things from a totally different angle, presses in season and out for advancement and more pay. And if only the college man of exceptional mind or personality pressed in this fashion there would be, in all probability, little protest. Big Business, with its knotty problems, at all times hungers and thirsts after exceptional ability; is by no means slow in discovering it, or niggardly in its rewards. But, so the executive complains, the college man with nothing out of the common to offer is even more impatient to advance than his more highly endowed brother. It is, indeed, the discovery that the college man of only average ability is far more of a problem and less of an asset to Big Business than the average man of less education that has led more than one executive to the proviso: ‘If I must take college men, I want only the best — not necessarily men whose marks have been highest, but all-around, capable fellows.’
Again and again — I think I may say it is generally the case — even before an executive acquires a young man of this calibre he has in mind the berth for which he intends him eventually. If not beforehand, he soon determines on one when he sees him exhibiting promising traits. The young man may be slated for a position of real importance; he may be intended, quite unknown to himself, for Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, or London. But the executive must keep him under observation long enough to see how he handles a variety of matters, to learn the impression he has made on others as well as himself. To confide his intentions to the young man at the start would be to run the risk of disappointing, perhaps destroying him. This seems a difficult thing for the college man to grasp — that he himself, no less than Big Business, is protected when he is not told of what is in prospect for him till the hour is ripe. Only faith will serve him at the start — faith that if he gives unusual services he wall in time reap unusual reward.
It used to be my custom in visiting a college, after conferring with the dean and various professors and after examining records, to arrange to see a group of a dozen to twenty men. Following my setting forth of what the business I represented had to offer, there was always one man who would inquire, and he seemed to express a half-uttered desire to know on the part of others: ‘Now, can you tell me — not exactly, of course, but approximately — what I should be getting three or four years from now if I came with your company?’
My answer, without too serious a face, would run something like this: ‘If you can tell me the quality of service you would render in the next three or four years, in the event you should enter the company I represent; if you can tell me how you would meet the various exigencies that would arise in that length of time, and the impression you would make on the persons in the organization with whom you came in contact, I can give you approximately the figure that would be opposite your name on the pay roll.’
Obvious as all this may seem, I have found the college man, even the very bright college man, slow to believe that the result of his union with Big Business so largely depends on himself.
Though the circumstances may be extenuating, none the less the college man, from my observation, does himself distinct harm during his initial period in business by keeping his gaze constantly riveted on what he is to get, rather than on what he is to give. One of the well-founded charges against college men who enter Big Business is that they flock together, form a clique; and, from what they themselves report, the all-absorbing and unending theme of their conversation — at meal time, in their rooms at night, and while they snatch smokes together during business hours — is how much this one and that is drawing, the sensational salary reported to be paid somebody else with some other concern, and their personal prospects in regard to increase.
The colleges assert that they make every effort to induce a different attitude in the student planning to go into business, but the only answer is that thus far college teaching along this line has been largely ineffective.
Business executives, as a rule, worked long and arduously for their own advances. In their own youth it was a grave impropriety for a young man to ask for a larger salary. They cling to the old view. And when they do increase a young man’s pay they expect him to exhibit real appreciation. The college man, however, not only takes an advance as a matter of course, but not infrequently walks into their offices and argues that it should have been more!
The college man, almost without exception, expects to become — and shortly — an executive. I can truthfully state that not one young college man in a hundred with whom I have discussed a business future has failed to make it plain that the thing above everything else he was interested in was an executive position. His knowledge of the various functions of business might be shadowy, he might be far from clear as to the line in which he intended to direct others, but there was no uncertainty whatever in his expectation of acting as director.
However brutal the college man regards it, I believe the best bit of counsel that can be given him is to forget for his first five years in business that there is such a word in his vocabulary as ‘executive.’ His failure to use the term will not defeat any secret hopes; and certainly in no other one way does he so prejudice his case as when he talks, and often with the utmost sang-froid, of an executive position for himself, talks of it as a certainty, and to business superiors who may not yet have determined whether they wish to retain him even in a minor capacity.
Not a little, in fact, of the irritation Big Business feels with the college man has to do with his manners. Executives easily excuse crudeness in a man who has come up from the ranks, but they are still very generally filled with the notion that a college education connotes gentility. Overlooking the truth that men from every walk of life now go to college, they are astonished, at times infuriated, when a graduate of Harvard, Dartmouth, the Wharton School of Finance, or the University of Chicago, bursts open the office door, without having made a previous appointment, and interrupts what may be a serious consultation. The vast majority of executives of high rank of the present day did not go to college; they tend in one and the same breath to depreciate a college education and to exaggerate the benefits it confers. They often appear unaware that if a young man has not imbibed the elements of good breeding in his own home he will not acquire them at college.
I recall a gifted young man, about a year out of college, to whom had been given the ever-pressing problem of the conservation of office space. It was intended, of course, thatany changes he proposed should be brought about by diplomatic approach to the executives affected. But the young man was so captivated by the really admirable readjustments he had worked out that he went strutting around the sales department, announcing to the sales correspondents that the sales manager’soffice was entirely too large and that he proposed to take some of the space away and give it to others. The young man’s lordly words reached the sales manager. After a few hearty laughs over the matter, the sales manager’s wrath vanished, but it was incalculably more difficult to introduce a college man into his department than it had been before.
While colleges do not attempt to teach manners to the mannerless, more than one educator is all but convinced that the student’s future progress will be to a great extent dependent upon them. The dean of one of our oldest and most important schools of business administration told me that after comparing the business career with the college record of a large number of men he was inclined to believe that the two qualities that had more to do with business success than any others were tact and initiative, and of these he would give first place to tact.
The college man himself is prone to resent a suggestion of the sort. He may tell you that the ‘glad-hander’ is not a model he aspires to follow, blind to the wide range that lies open to his choice between boorishness and Babbittry.
The case recurs to me of a young man whose professors were enthusiastic over the way he had prepared business reports assigned him, gathered business data, and so on. They called him one of their star men. For more than two years after he entered Big Business every effort was made to fit this young man into the right niche. His college expressed much surprise that he was not giving a good account of himself. Finally, when he had accumulated so many black marks that it was impossible to transfer him again, it was decided to ‘let him out.’ It devolved upon me to do so.
I wish,’ he said, with rather touching humility, ‘that you would tell me what is the matter with me.’
‘Do you think you can stand it?’
‘Fire away!'
‘Well, then, I may be mistaken, but the trouble is, as I see it, that you ’re still revolving around yourself. You ’re not even aware of the existence of other people. They may not always analyze what it is about you that antagonizes them, but it’s the fact that when you deal with them you don’t know they ’re there.’
‘What am I going to do about it?’
‘Sail out on a voyage of discovery. Start from this port — your first dismissal. Discover that there are millions and millions of people in the world besides yourself. The very minute you’ve made the discovery it’ll write itself in your eyes. They ’ll know.’
III
If Big Business protests mainly against the college man’s manners and his impatience to advance, the college man’s charges against Big Business are, it must be admitted, far more numerous, if not always so substantially founded.
The first jolt the college man receives is when he finds he is no longer in college. During his college career he has considered himself a rather free individual, standing on his own feet. The truth is, he has been tied to strong leading strings. Cut loose from them, he flounders around in this new element, the great chaotic world of business, assailing it for the lack of direction it gives him. Quite unconsciously he has carried over into the business world the habits and expectations of the campus. He thinks of himself as taking a sort of postgraduate course, misses a set curriculum and marks. If there are college men who discern only too plainly the line of their ascent, far more complain, ‘What’s ahead of me? That’s what I can’t see!’ Not a glimmer has yet reached such a man that his power to see this will be the measure of his progress; that business leaders have largely developed their strength through hewing their own paths, and through just such a dark maze as he himself faces.
However that may be, more than a few farsighted executives believe there is unwarranted waste for Big Business as well as for the college man in this early period of floundering. More and more companies are instituting training courses for their college men. But whatever may be done in this line, conditions of campus and company must remain broadly different; and in the present day, at least, the college man can probably more readily adjust himself to these differences than can the older, more unwieldy party to the alliance.
It is, I imagine, the illusion that he is still at college that leads the college man to ask, during his business novitiate, for many special privileges. He is accustomed to a more flexible institution. Moreover, the one he has left was created especially to care for his needs. The one he has entered was built without regard to them. Being of the age when his friends are marrying and being given in marriage, he often, for example, asks for a few days off to run out to Detroit, or to some other city far or near, to act as groomsman. To the Big Business executive, weddings, unless in his own family, have ceased to have much importance. The young man’s innocent request assumes to him, especially if made in the busy season, almost monstrous proportions. Only the college man, he declares, expects such privileges. And the college man, for his part, thinks it ‘entirely too trivial a matter to kick up a row about.’ Not yet thoroughly acclimatized, he has not learned that the trivial may loom as large in the daily inner life of a great world-flung organization as in the most insignificant domestic ménage.
I know it to be a fact, that one unusually capable young college graduate seriously, if not indeed irreparably, damaged his future when, on being offered a post in a distant city, one that marked definite advancement and to which he was expected to proceed at once, he asked whether he might not delay two or three weeks in order to act as attendant at a local wedding.
On the college man’s side, in this difference of outlook, I heard one charge indignantly against an executive with strict notions of business duty, ‘Why, that man would n’t expect me to take time to go to my mother’s funeral!’
To-morrow Big Business will belong to the college man. It remains to be seen what he will make of it. To-day it is largely governed by the old type of executive, and perhaps the best thing the college man can do with certain of its conditions is to keep them well in mind till the time comes when he may correct them, if he still considers these conditions unnecessary and obnoxious.
Not the least of the shocks from which the college man must recover is his discovery that business, even Big Business, is unbusinesslike. There was nothing in lecture or textbook to suggest this — no hint from professors. He has been led to believe that great business organizations proceed almost invariably by well-thought-out policies, by virtually error-proof methods, from triumph to triumph, instead of, as in fact, muddling along with one flash of insight and then another to carry them through their welter of waste and costly, if well-covered-up, mistakes. For four impressionable years the young collegian has heard Big Business exalted, almost apotheosized. He joins himself to it in a flame of enthusiasm. No matter what wonders it reveals to his more mature vision, the wounds of his first disenchantment are slow to heal.
In many directions he is all at once let down. In nine cases out of ten he finds his work too easy. It is the fashion of the day to advise the ‘manufacturer with idiot son to send him to Harvard, where he will have no difficulty in making the grade.’ But the fact remains that Harvard and all other universities of the first rank have courses sufficiently stiff to exercise the best brains they are likely to be asked to direct. A fair proportion of the ‘best brains’ are passing each year from college into Big Business, and with a starting business schedule so light in comparison with the work previously expected of him that the college man quickly becomes restive.
Of his illusions, the very first, however, to be shattered is in regard to the loyalty he has assumed existed and to which he has so often heard glowing reference. In a huge modern business enterprise, men are attached or disaffected according as they consider themselves to have been well or unfairly treated by the nebulous aggregation that goes by the name of ‘the company.’ And a large proportion of men, even in the most competently administered corporations, consider themselves to have met something less than their due.
The college man arrives, slightly nervous, but in high spirits, to start his first day. He is turned over to Mr. X, a minor executive, ten or fifteen years with the company and in a fairly responsible position. Mr. X turns him over to subordinates who are to familiarize him with the work of the department. Before closing time the college man has heard half a dozen times what is considered more important than anything else that the newcomer should find out: ‘Believe me, there’s no chance for a man in this company!’ By the end of his second day he has learned that Mr. X himself has little faith in the company’s opportunities.
If filled too full of ‘disloyal’ talk, he becomes discouraged, severs his connection after a few months, and enters another huge and famous organization where he finds, to his surprise, exactly the same thing. In the course of several years, if he continues to change from Big Business to Big Business, he has ceased to be affected by talk of the sort, and has begun to realize that men who fail to rise rapidly must blame something, and can most plausibly blame ‘the company.’ He has begun to realize too that the number of men of first-rate ability whom Big Business fails to recognize is negligible. He sees, on looking back, that the men who sneered at ‘the company’ on his first day were men who had gone as far as their own limitations permitted. These discoveries, however, the college man makes after he has been somewhat seasoned, instead of during his first year, when they would have been of most value.
One way to lessen early shocks, with their concomitant disasters, is for the college man to enter Big Business forewarned. It is perhaps too much to ask of Big Business that it should tear away its own veils. But why not more accurate information from those who point the way to the business field? And it would help, of course, if Big Business itself could furnish more ranking executives willing to give the college man practical aid while he is passing through this stage. I used sometimes to ask a certain executive, at once rarely mellow and of most distinguished attainments, if he would not talk to this or that young college or technical man, utterly disheartened in regard to his future. And to observe the bearing of the college man after the interview was to know that many anxious questions had been satisfactorily answered. A Big Brothers Association as a part of Big Business would, I fancy, pay dividends.
For one thing, it might make the college man understand why a dull ear is so often turned to his cherished proposals; why they are tucked away, after being perfunctorily glanced at, to gather dust in cubbyholes already bulging with plans, graphs, sales analyses, and what not, prepared by other bright young college men. Every year young men enter Big Business genuinely competent to show it where it may save or make thousands upon thousands of dollars. To be able to show this is comparatively easy for the college man of unusual intelligence plus superior training. But to secure and hold the attention of an executive long enough to convince him of the value of a proposal, and convince him to the point where he is ready to act on it, is a vastly different matter. No subject in his curriculum, no laboratory, has given him the clue. No Emily Post has arisen to write for him a Business Bluebook. If the college man charges the failure of his suggestions to get over partly to his own maladroitness, he includes it also in a general vague feeling of resentment against the other party to the alliance.
Has the college in any degree been derelict? I am aware that college does not exist for the sole or even the primary purpose of fitting men to make money; but in view of the fact that an ever-increasing proportion of college men turn to business, could the college, along with its courses in cost accounting, the psychology of advertising, economic geography, statistics, and merchandising, have placed more emphasis on a human and personal art vitally important to the collegian’s future?
Solely chargeable, at any rate, to the college man’s youth is his tendency to regard any given Big Business as more or less a finished product. Deceived by its mass and momentum, in spite of the fact that, unlike Kipling’s Mulvaney, the college man is not unaware of his strength, he can hardly conceive himself making a dent on its stratified surface. He studies the organization chart, if it be not too carefully guarded. He pictures his own progress as conditioned by the death or removal to the superannuated list of a long line of superiors on the same branch to which he adheres, as yet a mere twig. What he does not see are the changes that will be wrought in this chart, the branches to be grafted where branches never grew before. Even less does he vision those potentialities within himself that may alter the chart’s whole aspect. No superhuman task. After all, Big Business is not the growth of ages. It is barely emerging from its own first year.
IV
The most serious indictment the college man brings against Big Business in its present stage of development, that the men who have shaped Big Business have themselves been shaped into forms he wishes to escape, is one to which any facile reply is more certain to bring silence than conviction. During his first year or so in business, the college man is still keenly sensitive to human values, not easily taken in by mere outward importance. Furthermore, however platitudinous the suggestion that, reverence for their elders merely on the score of their age is entirely lacking in the young people of to-day, it has definite bearing. Neither dad nor the president of a billiondollar combine escapes the clear-eyed scrutiny of the young college man of this era. Whatever may be true twenty years later, during his first year in business he examines its leaders, their views and their ways, with detachment and frequently with distaste. ‘If this— ' he says. ‘Well, I wonder — ’
But has the college man sufficiently considered that, unlike most of his elders, he himself has been taken up into the high places, whence he could look off and see something of the pattern? Has he discerned that the authors of ‘Business is Business’ missed his own early unclouded chance to perceive that Business is Life? It would be a pity if the college man, with his broad outlook, and Big Business, with its rich experience, should grow in distrust of each other.
‘But there is no adventure in Big Business,’ the college man still insists. ‘There is too great certainty.’
On the contrary, there is no certainty at all, but a heroic hazard for the man who is determined that, if it shapes, it shall not misshape him. And if he decides to take a hand in reshaping Big Business itself, as it exists to-day, — the product of the older generation, who laid its foundations and reared its walls,— he will find, I make bold to predict, play for all the inventiveness, the courage, the endurance, that has gone at any time into human achievement.