The Corporation as a College

DREAMS may be the stuff men are made of, but it takes more than dreams —it takes resources — to make societies. In recent years one of the dreams which has been preoccupying the thoughts of more and more people has had to do with our educational system. Knowledge is accumulating at so rapid a rate as a result of the larger number of people employed in knowledge-creating capacities that what a person has learned when he graduates from high school or college is obsolete or incomplete or inadequate before many years have passed. Particularly in technical and scientific fields, a person’s formal education loses much of its value in short order: in an earlier article in the Atlantic, “Retooling the Mind,” I spoke of an educational half life of ten years for engineering graduates.

The solution to this rapid obsolescence of acquired knowledge is not to be found in simple exhortations to continue study on one’s own. The acquisition of knowledge often requires the tutelage of those who have mastered it, and access to special facilities or laboratories. Continuing programs of formal instruction are needed so that individuals may return again and again to the classroom throughout their productive lives, supplementing their own experience with the frontier knowledge coming from many other minds.

But is such a dream practical? At a time when school construction is barely keeping up with the swelling flow of teen-age students, where would we find the classrooms to hold millions of adults in addition? Even more important, when we are already pressing into service half-trained teachers to meet present needs, what magic wand would produce the hundreds of thousands of additional teachers to carry forward the education of our adult population?

Some slender hopes may be found in the more widespread use of educational television, teaching machines, and programmed instruction, to be sure, but to count on these devices to meet the need would be self-deception. If we are talking about education in any meaningful sense, we are talking not simply about the learning of facts and techniques but about the inducing of a sense of discrimination and judgment with respect to knowledge acquired, and —still more difficult and exacting - the identification of areas of thought which are still too fuzzy to be programmed but where new knowledge is in the process of formation. If we go about cultivating a nation of mechanically trained technicians, we lose the educational battle in the very process of waging it.

For many years college instructors have been privately chagrined at the number of well-trained and intelligent people who have been lured into industry. There is probably no professor in the country who has not, again and again, gone out of his way to talk with some especially bright senior about the possibilities of a teaching career, only to find that he has already made the decision to enter business. Even though the financial reward is certainly not a minus factor, to assume that it is always the prospect of higher income which prompts the decision would be erroneous. Business has positive appeals for many people.

The result is that our business firms, and especially our large corporations, are now well stocked with college graduates, many with advanced degrees. Every year almost halt of all those who earn Ph.D.’s are drawn into nonacademic careers, many of them into positions which permit or require their use of professional skills. In a company like Honeywell, one out of seven employees is a technical or professional person. Some industrial centers, such as Bell Laboratories, have worldwide reputations for the quality of their research personnel. Any large corporation has many technical and professional people, even though proportionately fewer than the research-oriented companies.

The wealth of business-located talent is not confined to the giant firms; many a small specialized firm shelters highly trained people. Whether large or small, the businesses which have annually been swallowing a high proportion of college graduates and recipients of advanced degrees account for a high proportion of America’s stockpile of superior talent.

Many of these gifted people have neither the capacity nor inclination to turn teacher, but some have both skill and will. They would not leave their business positions to enter the academic cloister, but they would welcome the opportunity to be part-time instructors. If their time could be released on some regular and partial basis — say a day or a half day a week - they would constitute a major addition to the community’s teaching resources. In the process they would increase their own satisfaction and advance their own abilities: it is difficult to teach without further disciplining and projecting one’s thinking.

In any moderate-sized community, companies could jointly put together a rather impressive curriculum. Joint action in this respect would not fall under the disapproving eye of the Department of Justice’s Anti-trust Division, since a major public service would be involved which has no connection with either competition or the restraint of it. The term curriculum is not a mere figure of speech. With careful planning it would be possible to list in an annual catalogue or bulletin an assortment of courses in a variety of fields.

And who would be the students of this new business-based college? Employed individuals, who of their own volition, if satisfying minimum standards, would be released at the times when their elected courses convened. The regularity of meeting would facilitate rescheduling of work or workers as needed for each “academic” term in a way that would avoid interference with production or staff activity. These employee-students would not be engaged in sampling from a smorgasbord of courses. Like any formal study program, theirs would be planned to their own needs and capacities. An educational adviser - — an industrial “dean of students” — could assist each employee to select a sequence of courses which would supplement one another.

The courses need not be confined to the “new frontiers of knowledge. They could range from the most elementary English composition and arithmetic up to the most advanced scientific work now going on in certain fields. The program for dropouts which the Carson Pirie Scott department store in Chicago jointly sponsored with the city’s board of education is a sample of what can be done on the school front. Youngsters who had had no motivation to learn arithmetic in school found new interest in it in a commercial environment where its value was demonstrable. Many adults could profit from similar drilling in fundamentals, as the Armour Company’s union-management program to retrain workers displaced by automation has revealed. The percentage of men rejected for military service on the ground of functional illiteracy is further evidence of how much needs to be done by way of basic education for people who will never again, of their own volition, go inside a standard schoolhouse. At least some of these people may be motivated to try again within a business environment, on time released from work.

At the other end of the spectrum, even individuals holding Ph.D.’s might find courses in the new corporate curriculum more advanced than those available in the universities from which they received their degrees. An official of a major corporation recently wrote me, “In my field, geology, the majority of the new ideas are being developed within industry. There is a normal time lag of five to ten years between the development of the idea and its appearance in the periodical literature. This means that the education a young man receives is automatically antiquated, in spite of the best efforts of the professors to remain abreast of modern techniques.” In this case, as in others, an “industrial university” could offer postdoctoral work difficult to duplicate on the academic campus. “On-the-job training” in such instances would mean working at the frontiers of knowledge.

SO FAR in this search for a lifetime educational program, we have identified the faculty, constructed a curriculum, and recruited the students. What of facilities? Where are the classrooms which would accommodate the employees whose time would be scheduled to allow them the half day or so each week for formal instruction and study? There would be no better place than the premises of the cooperating companies, in meeting rooms either set aside for the purpose or released for use as classrooms.

Classes could be scheduled right through the week, so that neither all employee-instructors nor all employee-students would be off at the same time. It is hard for anyone to escape the excitement and challenge of learning when he is in its presence — he senses it as soon as he sets foot on any college campus and encounters knots of students oblivious to all except the discussion in which they are engaged. Can we not import some of that same atmosphere into the workplace?

The chances are that classes would be concentrated in those plants or offices offering preferable facilities, but the cooperative arrangement would permit an employee to elect courses wherever they might be given. If enough people were drawn into the program, there would be an inescapable spillover, and the spirit of learning could be spread throughout the working community. People would be surrounded by it, in one way or another, throughout their working lives. The present artificial separation between school and employment could be bridged; learning would continue simultaneously with earning; advancement in knowledge would proceed with progress in a career.

The advantage of this kind of arrangement is that it avoids the need for lengthy leaves to continue learning. Industrial sabbaticals might still be given to an exceptional individual who is anxious to return to the academic environment for a year of professional study, yet for most employees such a prospect may be neither feasible nor very alluring. But a half day a week, year in and year out, as long — but only for as long — as one wishes requires no major decision, no single act of commitment, no gamble. It is something which can be tried, and if the try does not come oil, nothing has been lost.

Further advantages follow from such a program. It would de-emphasize the degree as such. A person would accumulate an educational record just as he does an employment record, year by year, and that record as a whole — not a label — would indicate his educational attainments. The invidious distinction between college and noncollege men and women could be effectively reduced. One pleasing consequence might be that fewer youngsters would drift through college simply to pick up the prestige of a degree.

The business world could be brought back into the cultural mainstream, as an integral part of our nation’s intellectual activity. Is it too farfetched to imagine that our major corporations might begin appointing vice presidents in charge of education, not job training in the old sense, but genuine honestto-goodness education, and that youngsters entering the job market might select one company over another, or one community over another, because it offered them superior educational facilities? Is it too fanciful to conceive of job seekers poring through corporate course catalogues with an interest at least equal to that which they might now give to a statement of wage policy, working conditions, and fringe benefits?

That the concept of the corporation as a college need not be only a flight of imagination is suggested by a few programs already in being. Perhaps the most ambitious is IBM’s. In each of its locations which are large enough to ensure sufficient enrollment, a voluntary education program offers courses which meet once a week, over two semesters, in such subject areas as electricity and electronics, mathematics, engineering science, manufacturing and production, business administration, and a clustering of fields such as logic, psychology, and decision-making under the broad rubric of “personal development.” “A student can progress in a given subject area from an introductory level up through college, and, in some cases, graduate level courses,” reads the introduction to a twenty-cightpage fall catalogue for one location. Most instructors are drawn from IBM’s own ranks. An educational consultant is available to help work out a suitable program with any interested employee.

In some instances the participation of an educational institution has been sought, to give further assurance that a program incorporates sufficient substance. Westinghouse’s educational department has, for example, teamed with Carnegie Institute of Technology in offering a concentrated seminar for its engineering managers, emphasizing developments in materials, energy, and systems, with supporting instruction in mathematics and physics.

THE financing of corporate universities would take some imagination, but no more than has been needed to accomplish what we have already done in the matter of pensions, accident and health insurance, and unemployment compensation. As in these areas, some combination of public and private financing would seem preferable. Tuition costs could be set on a per course basis and could be met partly through public subsidy. The cost of released time could be bargained for or granted as a fringe benefit, perhaps at the start with some form of matching public grant — one public-financed hour for every private-financed hour — to induce employers and employees to act and to lighten the initial financial impact.

To the extent that enlightened public economic policy continues to lessen the danger of recurring recessions, and continuing education proves effective in making our labor force more adaptable and upgradable, tunds now allocated to the alleviation of unemployment or accelerated retirement may be at least partially diverted to educational financing. From whatever source the financing comes, it constitutes a genuine social investment, paying dividends in the form of a more productive work force. In a real sense, investment in education is selffinancing over a time, even though the degree to which this is true is largely unmeasurable.

The corporation as a university is a project, a realizable dream, behind which both managements and unions can unite. It offers benefits to both. To management it offers a more highly skilled and more flexible labor force. To the unions, not only the prospect of higher real incomes for their members in time but an immediate reduction in hours of work, with an employment-spreading effect. Spreading the work is the consequence, moreover, not of some desperate expedient to alleviate a shortage of jobs, but of a positive purpose.