Current co ncern ab out meaningful employ men t opportunities for college graduates is focusing

attention on communication and coordination between higher education and the world of work.

higher education and -

human resources: communication channels and mechanisms of coordination

lynn wood robert c. Wilson

The success of higher education’s response to the challenge of the sixties to expand educational opportunities to the working classes, ethnic minorities, and women has paradoxically contributed to what some think is its most recent failure, a marketplace flooded with more college graduates than society can usefully absorb.

Critics such as Dresch (1973) think that the problem is the 6 6 overconsumption” of higher education and call for new restrictive educational policies. Others, such as OTooIe (1975) and Goldwin (1975), believe the problem lies in the overselling of the job prepa- ration aspects of higher education. These critics call on higher edu- cation to de-emphasize vocational training and to put greater stress on the intellectual, cultural, and self-development benefits of a col- lege education. Most writers, however, see the problem more in

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terms of higher education’s failure to prepare and counsel its stu- dents adequately for the world of work. They call for more voca- tionally-relevant programs and improved career counseling to assist liberal arts students in developing marketable skills.

In this article we examine two models of the relationship be- tween higher education and.work. We then explore some of the assumptions inherent in both models in light of what is known about how students perceive the relationship between education and ca- reers, how and when they make career decisions, what kinds of market information are available to students and higher education personnel for making educational decisions, and how this information is used.

two models

Market Model. One view of the relationship between higher education and the world of work is succinctly stated by David Kaun (1974, p. 148):

For most men (and increasing numbers of women) the univer- sity is the last respite (or hell, as the case may be) before em- barking on a forty- to fifty-year effort at making a living. A good portion of the interest in and time spent at the university is devoted to choosing and preparing for a lifetime occupation . . . In serving this function, one can think of the university as a transition device, a device that takes as its input high school graduates, and turns out entrants into the labor force. Existing labor market pressures and projections (particularly as they relate to occupational needs and skill requirements) operate on those who “run” the university-the faculty and administra- tion. These pressures affect the course and curricular require- ments and the allocation of resources to competing programs. These same external labor market pressures, as well as more personal forces (e.g., family background and occupation), operate on students entering and continuing through the uni- versity.

This model is easily recognized, even by those who have never been exposed to the formal study of economics, as an exam- ple of “supply” and “demand” in a free market economy. Accord- ing t o such a model, the current oversupply of college graduates will

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not continue because would-be college students, perceiving little economic advantage in going to college, will not go. Similarly, among the youth who decide to attend a college or university, their choices of majors and future careers will be shaped in large part by the current and projected demand for graduates in those fields.

Institutions of higher education, responding to both the voca- tional interests of students and the manpower needs of society, will reallocate their resources to create new programs and will redirect students to those programs of study which are in high demand in the marketplace. The channels of communication are seen to flow from the marketplace to current and potential students and to institutions of higher education, and because both individuals and institutions behave in their own “best” (that is, economic) interests, problems of supply and demand in human resources are self-correcting.

Manpower Planning Model. A second model-which might be called a Manpower Planning Model-is essentially a should version of the Market Model. Just as the Market Model assumes a close coordination between education and jobs, the Manpower Planning Model assumes, as Bowen (1974, p. 15) puts it, that “the educa- tional system should be geared to turning out the ‘right’ number of workers for each kind of available employment.” Proponents of the latter claim that because of the current system of public financing of much of higher education and the relatively small portion of the cost borne by the students, the Market Model does not work very well and new efforts must be made to overcome its failures.

One of these presumed failures is the current “overconsump- tion” of higher education. Dresch (1973, p. 337), for example, expresses the view of some economists that the provision of low- cost public higher education to students-regardless of their ability to pay-causes too many of them to ignore the “opportunity costs” of college attendance (that is, the cost-benefit ratio) and to there- fore “overconsume education.” The second of these failures is the presumed unwillingness of higher education to respond to the needs of the larger society by expanding and contracting admissions in certain fields in response to changing market pressures and projec- tions, and by reallocating resources to phase out programs for which there is declining market demand and creating new vocation- ally-oriented programs to respond to new market demands.

Comparing the Manpower Planning Model to the kind of edu- cational policy characteristic of the planned economies of the Soviet block, Bowen (1974, p. 15) points out three basic assump-

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tions of the model: “(1) that the number of jobs that require col- lege training are relatively few (a frequently cited number is 20 per- cent); (2) that the jobs available for college educated people should be congruent with their educational backgrounds; (3) that the econ- omy needs many persons to do menial tasks and these people should not be overeducated.”

There are, however, a number of additional assumptions underlying both the Market Model and the Manpower Planning Model which have important implications for understanding and improving communication and coordination between higher educa- tion and the world of work. These are pragmatic assumptions about how the system works and possible opportunities and limitations for making it work better.

assumptions underlying the models

College Attendance and the Marketplace. The first assumption inherent in both the Market and the Manpower Planning Model is that the primary reason people go to college is to prepare for a job. There has in fact been a strong tendency in American society to look upon education first and foremost as vocational or career preparation. But it has also been repeatedly found that Americans value higher educa- tion as a “good thing,” and most of them want their own chiIdren to attend college; yet, as the research of Campbell and Eckerman (1964) has shown, few people are able to articulate what it is that is good about going to college with any degree of sophistication. This may be due in large part to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the adult population has no direct, firsthand experience of higher educa- tion. The 1974 Census Bureau Survey, for example, indicates that only 25 percent of the population over the age of twenty-five has attended college, a percentage that is considerably higher than a dec- ade ago. To some extent the public view of higher education as pri- marily vocational comes about because the occupational-training and career-preparation aspects of colleges and universities are among their most visible benefits: most people do know, for example, that a col- lege education is required for the professions, such as medicine, the law, or teaching. Beyond that, they know only that higher educa- tion is in some sense related to “getting ahead” in the world.

Some evidence bearing on the relationship between experi- ence with college and its perceived value for vocational preparation is shown in the 1963 national survey by Campbell and Eckerman

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(1964, pp. 34-36). They found that the “highly educated and the occupationally and economically advantaged are considerably less likely to place major emphasis on job training than are the rest of the population.” This suggests that as the proportion of the adult population which has attended college increases to 50 percent or more (based on current rates of college attendance among the young and the somewhat increasing tendency for older Americans to enroll in college), the popular view of the main purposes of higher education might be expected to become more sophisticated and varied, with less exclusive emphasis on its role in vocational and career preparation.

More recent data from alumni are supportive of Campbell and Eckerman’s findings and at the same time extend our under- standing of how the benefits of higher education differ for alumni in different types of life roles. In a survey of college graduates, Spaeth and Greeley (1970, pp. 20-21) found that the traditional distinction between general and vocational education does not seem to be a valid one for 1961 graduates seven years out of school.

The alumni . . . are more sympathetically disposed toward general or intellectual goals than they are toward career-train- ing goals for higher education, and . . . their ideas about the reform of higher education are strongly generalist, if not to say humanist. But the critical conclusion to be derived . . . is that if general or intellectual or liberal goals of higher educa- tion .are more important to the alumni, it is primarily because their present life role seems to demand the skills that general or liberal or intellectual education provides. Furthermore, while they are somewhat less likely to endorse specific voca- tional training, it is clear that they do not reject vocational education but are rather more likely to think of it more broadly than do the professional educators.

They also found that 77 percent of the alumni said that in selecting a college for their oldest child, it was “very desirable” that the college “offers a good general education,” whereas only 48 per- cent felt that it was “very desirable” that the college “gives good career training” (p. 83).

A wide variety of studies (see the summaries by Feldman and Newcomb, 1973, Vol. 2, pp. 10-15) has shown that vocational or career preparation is the main reason given by most freshmen for

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their attending college. I t is important to note, however, that just as alumni regard vocational preparation as less important than does the general public, students come to regard it as less important by the time they are seniors, when their experience of college is more extensive.

Yankelovich (1974) estimates that about one-third of today’s college students stress almost exclusively the career-related purposes of their education and another third stress personal and social values while IargeIy eschewing traditional career considerations. The remaining third (p. 20) “strike what is perhaps the dominant theme of today’s college climate: they are trying to achieve a synthesis between the old and the new values by assuming that it is possible to seek and find self-fulfillment and personal satisfaction in a con- ventional career, while simultaneously enjoying the kinds of finan- cial rewards that will enable them to live full, rich lives outside of their work.”

The implications of these findings are important for under- standing imperfections in the Market Model: Not everyone attends colIege primarily to prepare for a job and even among those who do, many come to value education for other than economic reasons as they gain first-hand experience of it. These findings also have implications for a Manpower Planning Model. Should, for example, those who value higher education for nonvocational and noneco- nomic reasons be denied admission? Should nonvocationally- oriented students be given extensive career counseling and re- directed from their major concentration in the liberal arts into professional and vocational training programs? If the system of pub- lic financing were changed so as t o require all but the most capable among the poor to pay their own way, would those who value edu- cation primarily for its own sake or for self-development be willing to pay the price?

Career Decisions and the Marketplace. A second assumption common to both the Market and the Manpower Planning Model is that most people select fields of study and plan future careers pri- marily on the basis of the availability of jobs in those fields. Data bearing on this assumption suggest that while some students do seem to be responsive to market demands, even more students are responsive to perceptions of social need. Confusion between “demand” and “need,” as we will see later, is not limited to college students.

AnaIysis of data from the most recent American Council on

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Education (ACE) survey (Astin and others, 1974) shows that of freshmen entering colleges and universities in 1974, only 46 percent said that “job openings available” was a very important reason for their long-term career choices. Five reasons more often cited as very important in deciding on a career choice were: intrinsic interest in the field (71%); be helpful to others (61%); work with people (58%); contribute to society (51%); and work with ideas (47%).

Job opportunities were somewhat more important to women (52%) than to men (42%), a finding which supports the general con- clusion that the Women’s Liberation Movement and affirmative action are having the effect of making women more career-minded. Differences between students in two- and four-year colleges and universities were slight, a finding which reflects the fact that despite the community colleges’ vocational image among the public at large, the large proportion of high-socioeconomic-status students now following traditional academic programs in these institutions tends to make their student bodies appear much like those of four- year institutions and universities with respect to student values. Stu- dents at public institutions did tend to stress job availability some- what more than those at private institutions.

The most dramatic difference was in the percentage of fresh- men in predominantly Black colleges who felt that job availability w a s very important. Sixty-one percent of the males and 70 percent of the females in these institutions said that “job openings avail- able” was very important, and, unlike males at other colleges and universities, this reason for making a long-term career choice was second only to “high anticipated earnings” for males in Black col- leges. Freeman (1974, p. 105) has also presented dramatic evidence of the greater importance attributed to market factors in the career decision-making of Black college men. In a 1970 survey, he found that “stability of income or employment” and “level of income” were rated as important by 82 percent and 63 percent respectively, of Black students in choosing a career. By comparison, only 21 and 16 percent of the nonblack students regarded these two factors as important.

A second, and more indirect, way of assessing the effects of the marketplace on students’ choices of careers is to look at shifts in the percentages of successive college cohorts who select different careers. In actuality, very little is known about why there are such shifts and one can only infer whether they make sense according to a Market Model. In some career fields in which severe job shortages

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have been widely reported in the mass media, the numbers of stu- dents attracted to those fields have declined sharply. The most recent and dramatic example has taken place with respect t o ele- mentary and secondary school teaching. Again, analysis of ACE data shows that whereas 24 percent of the 1961 freshmen and 22 percent of the 1967 freshmen planned careers in these fields (Jacob- son, 1973), in 1974 only 6 percent favored teaching as a career (Astin and others, 1974). The decrease has been even more dra- matic for women, who have traditionally constituted the largest proportion of the teaching force. From 1961 to 1974 the perceni- age of first-year college women planning careers in teaching dropped from 45 to 12 percent.

While there is some evidence that students are deflected from some career fields in which the demand has fallen or the supply has overtaken the demand, there is also evidence that they are attracted to careers presumed to be in demand because they have been given widespread publicity in terms of social needs or proposed national goals. Drawing again from ACE data, we find an increase in the number of freshmen planning careers as a farmer or forester and in the health professions generally.

Peterson (1972), in analyzing enrollment trends, also found that students were “moving into new fields of study (and out of old ones) in unusually large numbers.” He concluded (pp. 30-31) that:

CoIlege students seem to be surprisingly responsive to well- publicized national currents. Students flocked into the physi- cal sciences and engineering in reaction to the Sputniks. They are now flocking into the health- and ecology-related fields, and into undergraduate bioIogy, which supports both. Health care and environmental improvement are two issues much in the media and on the minds of informed citizens. Law (prac- ticed on behalf of citizen interests) is another field/career in which there is burgeoning student interest (applications up 51 percent in one year). People-helping fields, such as social welfare and psychology, are yet another focus of student interest . Continuing, Peterson noted that “the fact that job prospects

are excellent only in one of these four broad fields (health care) seems to make little difference. Their appeal springs from the ideol- ogy and conscience of the generation.’’

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Instability of Career Decisions. The third major assumption, inherent especially in the Manpower Planning Model, is that student career choices are sufficiently stable to make career counseling and vocational training feasible solutions to the manpower problem. It is true that, whether or not a student is primarily vocationally oriented, most students enter college with some “probable career” in mind. The ACE survey data show that less than 13 percent of the 1974 entering class were undecided about their choice of careers. There are a number of reasons for questioning the reliability of the career choices of freshmen however. One reason, as Warren (1970, p. 182) has observed, is that:

The occupational world today is so bewildering and volatile that to expect freshmen or even seniors to have made firm occupational decisions seems absurd. Yet many students say they are going to college to prepare for a vocation because that is the only way they can justify their presence there to themselves, their families, and society. They are aware that the assertion of a vocational goal is only a sop to convention.

This might be expected to be especially true of students whose parents have not attended college and who, as we have seen earlier, tend to view the purpose of college in strongly vocational terms. The great importance placed on career-related values by Black students and by large numbers of students in public institu- tions of higher education would also seem to suggest that they share (or pay homage to) the values of their parents and society.

A more important reason for questioning the long-term valid- ity of the career choices made by entering students is found in the longitudinal data on the stability of career choices both before, dur- ing, and after attending college. Data from Project Talent (Folger and others, 1970, p. 202), for example, have shown that two-thirds of those who were in the ninth grade in 1960 had changed their initial career choice by the time they were high school seniors four years later. Similarly, recent ACE data on the 1967 freshman cohort have shown that over 40 percent of the students reported having changed their career choice by the time they were seniors in 1971. Yet, as freshmen only 18 percent of the cohort had thought that the chances were “very good” that they would make such a change.

Numerous other studies, many of which have been summa-

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rized by Feldman and Newcomb (1970, Vol. 1, pp. 36-37), have found that between one-third and two-thirds of college under- graduates change their choice of careers between the freshman and senior years. Yet even these data do not tell us how many times the changers made changes in their career decisions or how often the nonchangers felt indecisive about their choices. Earlier longitudinal data presented by Astin and Panos (1969), for example, have shown that one out of every four seniors in 1964-65 changed their long- term career plans during their senior year. As they conclude (p. 36), “the question of career choice is still largely unsettled, even during the last year.”

The instability of many students’ career choices is also evi- denced by the reasons they give for dropping out or stopping out of college or for changing colleges during their undergraduate years. Astin and Panos (1969, p. 31) report that of the 44 percent of the 1961 freshmen who left their college of matriculation, a little over 20 percent gave “changed career plans” as a major reason, and 26 percent of the men and 18 percent of the women said they had left because they “wanted time to reconsider” their interests and goals.

Nor do career choices become wholly stabilized for many stu- dents even after graduation from college. A recent study by the Col- lege Placement Council (Bisconti, 1975, p. 6), which traced the occupational outcomes of the ACE national cohort of 1961 fresh- men six years after graduation, found that “barely more than half the graduates were employed in the occupations they planned to enter in 1965.” How many of these occupational shifts were due to the unavailability of entry-level jobs in the original occupational choice and how many were due t o the attractiveness of new career possibilities is not clear. Either way, there is some evidence that high proportions of the college-educated are highly mobile with respect to changing occupations, especially in the early years. In an earlier study, cited by Folger and others (1970, p. 235), Sharpe and Krasnegor found that of students who received bachelor’s degrees in 1958, “one-fourth of the men and 17 percent of the women who were employed full-time.. . were not engaged in the same occupa- tion in 1963 as they had been in 1960.”

The knowledge we do have about the instability of careers may be taken as evidence of the need for more and better voca- tional counseling and training in colleges and universities, or it may be taken as evidence that such efforts would be wasted. In recent years, those who have studied vocational decision-making have

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come to realize that the connection between education and the world of work cannot be fully understood unless both are thought of as lifelong processes. In reformulating his theory of vocational choice first posed in the 1950s, for example, Ginsberg (1972a, p. 172) has concluded:

Occupational choice is a process that remains open as long as one makes and expects to make decisions about his work and career. In many instances, it is coterminous with his working life.

While the successive decisions that a young person makes during the preparatory period will have a shaping influence on his later career, so will the continuing changes that he undergoes in work and life.

People make decisions about jobs and careers with an aim of optimizing their satisfactions by finding the best possible fit be- tween their priority needs and desires and the opportunities and constraints that they confront in the world of work.

I t may well be that if all our fragmentary knowledge about when and why and how often people make career changes could be put into a single calculus, the resulting number of persons whose career plans followed a predictable path would be so small as to revolutionize our entire thinking about the relationship between higher education and the world of work. Certainly such data could be expected to engender skepticism about the possibility of finding simple ways to coordinate education and eventual vocational place- ment.

Direction of Communication. Implicit in both the Market and the Manpower Planning Models is the assumption that the flow of information about society’s needs for the development of human resources is unidirectional-that the needs are primarily defined by the governmental and economic sectors and transmitted to the high- er education community for its response. College students, faculty, counselors, placement officers, and administrators are not, however, exclusively consumers of information on society’s needs for devel- oping and utilizing human resources; they are also among the pri- mary sources of such information.

In providing information, higher education can be seen to make severaI kinds of contributions. FacuIty scholars and research- ers contribute to the definition and understanding of new social and technological needs which, in turn, affect the development and utilization of different types of human talent. Examples might include recent emphasis on the needs for early childhood education,

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mass transportation, protection of the environment, cancer re- search, and reforms in the legal justice system. Both individually, through their scholarship and their consulting activities, and collec- tively, through their professional and disciplinary associations, fac- ulty members also have considerable influence on policy formation, especially at the federal level. While not all federally-sponsored pro- grams originate with faculty scholars, of course, Yarmolinsky (1966) among others, has estimated their input to be extraordi- narily high.

There are other ways in which members of the higher educa- tion community contribute information to be used in the develop- ment and utilization of human talent. These include providing enrollment data by major fields and facilitating student and faculty participation in national surveys, such as those conducted under the auspices of the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education and the American Council on Education. They also collect and report infor- mation on job recruitment activities and the numbers and kinds of job offers students receive and accept through college placement offices. These data are then used not only by colleges and univer- sities themselves, but by various agencies of government, by high school teachers and counselors, by private and public employment offices, and-largely through their condensation in the mass media -directly by students and would-be students.

Adequacy of Information. A fifth assumption about how the system of communication and coordination between higher educa- tion and the world of work operates is that sufficient and reliable information exists about future job opportunities in different career fields to permit students and college personnel to engage in voca- tionally-relevant educational and career planning. Clearly, if stu- dents are to make enduring educational and career decisions on the basis of the future availability of jobs in various occupational fields, they need to have accurate information about the market for gradu- ates in those fields two, four, or even ten years in advance of enter- ing the world of work. Obviously teachers, counselors, and others who would counsel the young about their careers have the same informational needs. Also, because of the time required to create new programs or to restructure existing curricula, institutions of higher education need good, reliable manpower projection data if they are to be expected to reallocate their resources in response to changing social needs and demands for college-educated personnel.

How good is the information on the future demand for col-

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lege graduates in different occupational fields? A 1968 survey of junior college counselors in nine Bay-Area counties (Thal-Larsen, 1970) found “near-universal judgment” that they “possessed insuf- ficient information for the effective performance of their duties” (pp. 555-556). The kinds of information which they felt were most needed in their counseling activities were long-term trends of growth or decline in specific occupations and information concern- ing changes in the aptitudes, education, and training requirements for specific jobs. The published materials which they felt to be most helpful were: Occupational Outlook Handbook (Department of Labor) ; Occupational Guides (California State Department of Human Resources Development) ; the Career Information Service of the San Mateo County Board of Education; and, in fourth place, the occupational guidance publications available from commercial sources. Less frequently mentioned sources, although still con- sidered useful, were career pamphlets from four-year colleges and universities, the Counselors’ Guide to College Majors (California State Department of Education), and want ads appearing in the local newspapers.

There have been many criticisms of such information sources, however. Ginsberg (1972b, p. 4) has stated that, among other short- comings, these materials “tend to be too general in describing the nature of specific jobs, the alternative paths into jobs, the probable limits of advancement in each field, and linkages between occupa- tions. Moreover, the employment and wage data are given in nation- al aggregates rather than in detail on regional and local labor mar- kets.”

Career advisors in the Office of Placement Services at the University of California, Berkeley, gather career and market infor- mation from a wide variety of sources including newsletters, profes- sional journals, and newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal. Their best sources of information, however, are said to come direct- ly through conversations with employers and newly-employed uni- versity graduates.

Predicting the future is very difficult, and the track record of those who make manpower predictions has been spotty at best. There is considerable disagreement, however, as to whether it is pos- sible or even desirable to make accurate predictions of the future. O’Toole (1974, p. 20) has recently put forth the negative view: “Prediction from sheep entrails might be a better source of educa- tion decision-making than manpower forecasting. Since it is impos-

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sible t o predict what the job demands of the nation will be in the future, one cannot, in the vocational sense, make education relevant to work. And even if these demands were predictable, what right has society to impinge upon the freedom of individuals t o choose whatever career they want?”

Criticisms of the many inadequacies and past failures of man- power projections have also been made by the Carnegie Commission (1973), although they expressed the belief that some of the defi- ciencies can be remedied through improvements in the collection, coordination, and distribution of occupational information. In the June 1975 issue of Change Magazine (“New Manpower Studies. . . .”), there is a report that a subcommittee of the National Science Board has recently published a series of recommendations aimed at improving the “dubious accuracy and usefulness of govern- ment forecasts of supply and demand for scientists and engineers.”

One of the chief difficulties faced by those who would make manpower projections is determining the extent to which perceived social needs will be translated into actual jobs. As Folger and others (1970, p. 29) have pointed out, “Too often, projections have tended to confuse demand (the number of jobs that can be financed with current or future funds in a given occupation) with need (the number of persons in a field who will be required to provide a given level or amount of service judged to be desirable). The distinction is between social ideals (what people feel ought to be done) and eco- nomic redties (what people are able to pay for).”

Because the executive and legislative branches of government play a very great role in translating social and technological needs into the kinds of programs which affect both supply and demand for college graduates in different fields, a critical factor in any man- power projection is “what will the government do?” It is instructive to note that the National Science Board’s recommendations (p. 50) put particular stress on the “need for studies of the manpower requirements of federal regulations and programs to be spelled out in advance.” Helen Wood, former editor (1973) of Manpower Report to the President, has stressed the difficulty in estimating manpower needs in relation to the solution of new social and tech- nological problems. Using the energy crisis as one example, she stated (1974, pp. 302-303) that as of 1973 “there were still no firm estimates of the magnitude or duration of the fuel and energy short- ages or of their effects on employment.”

Greenberg (1975, p. 33) has warned of the dangers in re-

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sponding too quickly to projected needs in fields heavily dependent on future governmental actions (or inactions).

Institutions are . . . going to have to carefully weigh the wis- dom of linking themselves to the latest boom in research and development-which is energy. Currently there is a great deal of money in this field, and more is on the way. Furthermore, various projections indicate that a major increase in scientific and engineering manpower will be required t o make us na- tionally self-sufficient in energy. However, academic refugees still stream away from the debris of the space program. That, too, was once presented as a national goal to which academic science should commit a good part of its future. Many com- mitments, in faculty appointments and buildings, had to be abandoned when Washington abruptly decided that space research, after all, wasn’t so desirable.

Bowen (1974, p. 16) also questions the assumption that “valid predictions about the character of the economy and its skill requirements can be made for periods long enough to be pertinent to educational planning.” He illustrates not only the “iffy” nature of such projections but stresses the circular and multidirectional flow of communication and coordination involved in decisions about the development and utilization of human resources. “Man- power requirements depend on what the country wants to do and paradoxically what it wants to do is determined in part by the way its people have been educated-by the values they cherish, by the tasks they think worth accomplishing, and by what they have been prepared to do. For example, if the educational system turns out a surplus of teachers, the nation might well grasp the opportunity to go seriously into early childhood education and day-care centers.”

As we will see in the next section, many segments of the higher education community have begun to take a positive role in seeking out and defining new areas of employment for college grad- uates and in explicating and “selling” both the specialized and the flexible skills which these graduates have.

Responsiveness of Higher Education. A sixth assumption about the process of communicating and coordinating human re- source needs is that the higher education community has not been responsive to changing societal needs for the development and utili- zation of human resources. In this section we will look at two kinds

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of evidence of the role higher education has played and is playing in this area. One line of evidence comes from what current and former students say about the relationship between their college experi- ences and the world of work; the other comes from examples of career and job-related activities being undertaken by colleges and universities and by faculty members through their disciplinary asso- ciations.

Evidence from students on the importance of career counsel- ing and advising is mixed. As freshmen, for example, less than 10 percent of the 1974 cohort expected to seek vocational counseling during college, although only 55 percent felt that the chances were very good that they would find a job in their preferred field (Astin and others, 1974, p. 47). It would appear that career counseling and advising is not felt to be a pressing need at the time of entering college. By the time students are seniors, however, career advising and counseling begin to take on great importance. In a survey of 1972 graduates of five Pennsylvania colleges, reported by Wood (1974, pp. 306-7), for example: “Three out of five said they knew little or nothing of job opportunities when they selected their col- lege majors, and nearly one out of every five claimed that they would choose a different major if they were starting over again. The researchers concluded that, despite high career expectations, large numbers of college graduates enter the job market with apprehen- sions about their skills and with a probable preference for employ- ment other than that for which their college education prepared them.”

A recent survey at Cornell (CIUE, 1974, p. 3), found that the most frequent problem seniors faced was a “lack of direction about what they wanted to do and how to prepare themselves.” Similarly, out of thirty-four possible dimensions, seniors at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay (Hartley, 1974) indicated the greatest dis- crepancy between their actual and preferred progress to be on the following four dimensions: awareness of career opportunities in major areas of interest; preparation for occupational role in life; ability t o express oneself clearly, correctly, and effectively; and the acquisition or improvement of marketable skills and techniques.

It may be that there is a need for more student career coun- seling sometime between the freshman and senior years. The ques- tions of what kinds of counseling, at what points in time, and by whom are more difficult to answer. There is evidence (Bisconti, 1975, pp. 22-23) that college students are making greater use of

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college placement offices, especially in their search for employ- ment. College counselors and placement officers have not, however, played a very important role in influencing student career decisions. Among the college and university staff, faculty have tended to have the most influence on students’ career decisions. As one might expect, they have been especially influential for those choosing careers as scientists and college teachers (p. 25). In a recent study of faculty impact on students (Wilson and others, 1975, p. 131), fac- ulty members whom students nominated as having contributed most to their personal or intellectual development were reported as having provided career advice by more than two-thirds of the nominating students.

There is some evidence of a growing willingness among fac- ulty members to play a larger role as career advisors to undergradu- ates much as they have traditionally done in the case of graduate students. The Cornell study (CIUE, 1974, p. 4) found that 66 per- cent of the faculty members interviewed envisioned a new career counseling role for themselves, especially in being available as a resource in their field of specialization. They also felt that they could do more to cooperate with career placement and counseling and in referring students to appropriate career counselors and other faculty members. Similar interest has been found on other cam- puses-especially among faculty members in those fields where either enrollments or occupational opportunities for graduates have drastically declined.

Whether or not the responses being made by higher education are judged to be adequate t o the need depends, in part, on how widespread and urgent the need is felt to be. There is, however, a fair amount of responsive activity going on both in colleges and uni- versities and through the efforts of faculty disciplinary associations.

Some colleges and universities are undertaking special recruit- ment programs aimed at attracting women and minorities to fields which have previously been either perceived as “closed” or which have not appeared attractive to them. At the University of Pitts- burgh (Fields, 1974), the graduate school of business has used women’s pictures in publicity, increased the number of female fac- ulty members, held seminars for high school students, and used women as recruiters in order to increase the number of women stu- dents in that school. Similar methods have been successfully used to attract women to engineering at Purdue. A number of disciplinary associations have instituted committees on the status of women and

18

ethnic minorities in their fields; these committees are concerned not only with increasing their numbers among the faculty but with recruiting, training, and placing graduate students as well.

Disciplines which have experienced declining enrollments at the undergraduate level have also begun to explore ways of recruit- ing students to their fields by stressing the vocational relevance of their disciplines. A faculty member in the Department of German at Clemson University (Scully, 1973a) maintains what he calls a “port- able compilation of vocational opportunities in foreign languages,” which is a current list of available jobs that require or reward pro- ficiency in a foreign language.

One of the areas in which many faculty disciplinary associa- tions have become active is in seeking out nonacademic and non- traditional career opportunities both for their graduate students and their undergraduate majors. At the 1975 annual meetings of the American Philosophy Association (Semas, 19 75), philosophers wrestled with the fact that there are seven applicants for every teaching job in philosophy and that many job descriptions (espe- cially those in government) require degrees in fields other than philosophy; they have formed a special committee to look into non- academic jobs for philosophers. At their 1973 annual meetings (Scully, 19 73b), anthropologists discussed a proposal to curtail enrollments of traditional Ph.D. candidates and to “concentrate on programs that will enable B.A.’s and M.A.’s to find jobs outside higher education.’’ Similarly, the American Sociological Association (Foote, 1974, p. 126) commissioned a paper to “suggest some changes in the training of sociologists designed to increase sociologi- cal opportunities.” The paper focused on the kinds of skills re- quired for sociologists employed outside colleges and universities, such as knowledge of measurement and forecasting techniques and experience in developing social indicators.

Many disciplinary associations also have been active inpubli- ciring career information through the distribution of booklets for graduates in their fields. For example, the ASA newsletter, Foot- notes, now features a series of articles on nonacademic employment opportunities for sociologists. In 1974, the American Chemical Society (Science Education News, September 1974, p. 2) intro- duced in their Student Affiliate Newsletter a new program called Careers Nontraditional which has published reports on such topics as “Opportunities in Science Writing” and “Opportunities in Foren- sics.” The American Psychological Association has scheduled for

19

their 1975 meetings a symposium on “Undergraduate Education for Professional Careers in Community Work,” and has recently pre- pared a revision of its Careers in Psychology booklet. The American Political Science Association (Curzan, 1974) also published a book- let on Careers and the Study of Political Science-A Guide for Undergraduates in 19 74.

Academic departments, often with the assistance of their col- lege placement offices, also have begun to focus on career oppor- tunities for their undergraduate majors. The University of Michigan School of Education (“Teachers for Non-School Education,” 1975) has begun to explore the possibilities for teaching jobs in “non- school education settings” as an answer to the current surplus of education graduates. Opportunities being considered include teach- ing art appreciation courses in art galleries, drug education programs for county health departments, consumer education and other gen- eral interest programs for release over local and cable television sta- tions, and management and staff training seminars in industry. The program hopes to capitalize on the fact that “many people are seek- ing iearning opportunities without becoming ‘students’ in the con- ventional sense.” At the University of California, Berkeley, a num- ber of liberal arts departments, with the cooperation of the Office of Placement Services, have conducted seminars on career opportuni- ties for students with B.A. degrees in their fields which have fea- tured talks by former graduates about the kinds of jobs they have and how their undergraduate education has been useful to them in their jobs.

Among some of the kinds of changes being undertaken in undergraduate curricula are a number of programmatic efforts which are in direct response to the need for greater vocational guid- ance and the development of marketable skills, especially among students in the liberal arts. Perhaps one of the most interesting of these innovations has been the reinstitution of the “minor.” Unlike the traditional minor which was generally in a closely related field, the new major-minor combinations oftentimes consist of disciplines which would appear at first glance to make strange bedfellows. At Virginia Commonwealth University (“Careers in Psychology,” 1975) the Psychology Department has instituted seven “tracks” toward a B.A. in psychology, only one of which is specifically de- signed to lead to graduate work in psychology. Most of the other tracks in essence involve the students getting a minor in such fields as advertising, personnel work, rehabilitation counseling, and the

20

administration of justice and public safety. Efforts to incorporate management and business courses into foreign language programs have been made at several campuses of the California State College and University system (Dominguez Hills, Sacramento, San Berna- dino, and San Jose). At the Los Angeles campus, the English depart- ment, with the cooperation of business and economics, has created four mini-minors in accounting, management, statistics, and busi- ness economics which English majors are encouraged to take.

Another response of higher education is the creation of new degree programs which involve the cooperation of several institu- tions. One example is the five-year program instituted at SUNY, Binghamton, wherein the student completes a degree in a technical field at a nearby community college and at the same time earns a baccalaureate degree in one of the liberal arts. In Boyer’s view (Bird and Boyer, 1975, p. 35), “The joining of traditional disciplines with skills that can be marketed immediately is . . . a legitimate dual mission for the university in today’s world.”

Many institutions and departments have also instituted spe- cial courses in career planning and career opportunities. In the Cali- fornia State University and Colleges system, for example, a three- unit course in “Self-Concepts in Careers” is offered to all majors at San Diego and a two-unit course, “Careers in English,” is offered at Pomona.

In this review of recent institutional and disciplinary re- sponses to the need for developing and utilizing human resources, we have not cited the many examples of new programs which have been developed in conservation and environmental studies, para- professional health fields, and so forth, nor have we discussed pro- grams of cooperative education, work-study, and apprenticeship and internship. All of these are, in large part, responses to changing needs in the world of work and examples of cooperation and coor- dination between higher education and the world of work.

summary

The purposes of this article have been to summarize data drawn from a variety of sources about considerations which enter into the complex patterns of communication and coordination between students, institutions of higher education and the ever- changing demands and needs of society for college-trained man- power. We have made an effort to describe some of the factors

21

which affect students’ choices of a college major and subsequent occupational placement and to point out some of the problems in planning for alternative futures in view of the unknown conse- quences of shifts in societal policy which are difficult to deal with no matter how effective the current systems of communication and coordination are.

The data examined suggest that while most students regard higher education as a path to the better things in life, most of them do not limit their conception of higher education to preparation for a particular job. This is increasingly true as their experience with higher education increases. Nor are students’ career choices made so much on the basis of perceived job demand (job vacancies) as on perceived job need (social need). The desire to be helpful to others, to contribute to society, and to work with people in jobs which the student sees as intrinsically interesting are more important deter- miners of career plans than the number of job openings currently available. As has been pointed out, this may be a reflection of the altruism of college-age youth which may contribute not only to changing societal definitions of “needs” but to a greater societal willingness to fund programs which will respond to those needs.

Students’ career plans and career outcomes are not stable. A large proportion change their choice of careers at least once during their undergraduate years. Further, a survey of alumni five years after graduation found that approximately half were in occupations they had not planned to enter at graduation. Whether this is due to changing interests, more realistic information, unavailability of desired jobs, or a combination of these factors is not clear.

There seems to be a pervasive dissatisfaction with the kinds of information about the world of work generally available to stu- dents and higher education personnel. Among the major criticisms are that most of the information available is not specific or up-to- date. The most intractable problem is, of course, that of making accurate predictions of future manpower requirements. In the past, students have not made extensive use of college counseling and placement services; however, there are some signs that such usage is on the increase. There is some evidence that faculty members have been important sources of career information and advice in the past and could perhaps be more so if they had more and better informa- tion available to them. As we have indicated, a number of disci- plinary associations and colleges have initiated efforts to improve the quality of information available and to develop new programs

/ /

22

to increase the coordination between higher education and the world of work.

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Lynn Wood is assistant director of Teaching Innovation and Evaluation Services (TIES) at the

University of California, Berkeley. Robert C. Wilson is director of TIES. Both authors were

previously a t the Center for Research and Development in Higher Education where they

conducted studies of faculty, teaching environments, and teaching evaluation. They are coauthors (with J. G. Gaff, E. R. Dienst, and J. L. Bawy) of College Professors and Their Impact on Students (Wiley-lnterscience, 1975).