COURAGE AND CONFUSION IN CHOOSING A CAREER

You can't buy peace of mind with money.

--Johnson & Johnson.

Making people feel better can make you feel better.

--Warner-Lambert Pharmaceutical Co.

The failure to communicate. Everybody worries about it. At Xerox, you can help do something about it.

--Xerox Corp.

SUCH new capitalist slogans might confound a Karl Marx, but U.S. business knows what it is doing. It is trying to appeal to June graduates, and the traditional come-ons no longer work so well. Good money? They have enough, thank you. Special training? They have had all they want--on campus. An esteemed place in society? Many are not sure, or so they say, that they want to belong to this society.

Graduates can afford to be choosy about careers these days. For one thing, there are so many more occupations --21,741 at the last count by the Department of Labor. Technological change has opened up occupations at an unprecedented rate. The computer industry needs a steady flow of systems analysts, programmers and operators. The burgeoning aerospace field needs specialists in aeronomy and the ionosphere, experts in lunar and planetary studies. Even social ills create new careers. All the prodigal wastes of the era demand new experts--in smog and pest control, not to mention sanitation technology. Ecologists maintain a watch on the total environment, noting how change in one area triggers change in others. Ethnologists explore ways of dampening human violence before it becomes hopelessly harnessed to all the lethal weapons available. City planners try to bring some order out of the urban sprawl. The research institutes, or think tanks, recruit bold generalists or "futurists" to plot scenarios of the problems ahead. Modern society has produced all sorts of middleman and service jobs--public relations men, travel agents, pollsters and political-campaign experts, to cite a few. At another level federally financed antipoverty work has become a bona fide career for many people. And that, in turn, has helped to create specialists in the art of securing federal funds out of the confusing welter of available programs.

Rejection of Individualism

Despite the opportunities, however, today's graduates are surprisingly reluctant to seize them. Six years ago, an estimated 30% of the students at Northwestern University were undecided on a career. This year a survey showed that the undecideds amount to 54%. A Harvard senior expressed the prevailing mood: "If I'm alive and out of,jail when I'm 30, we'll see what happens." Even if he manages to come to a decision then, the chances are that he will not stay put. It is estimated that more than half the present June graduates will switch jobs at least once in the first five years out of college, a mobility without precedent in the U.S.

One reason for this phenomenon is the fact that today's collegians are more concerned with life-styles than with life work. Many of those whom FORTUNE recently called "forerunners" (perhaps 40% of all students) have apparently soured on individualism. They put their trust in "community," the keenly emotional solidarity of the young--in song, dress and politics--against the alleged hostility of those in the outside world, especially older people.

The student who owes his primary allegiance to a community of equals is unlikely to be racked with ambition to climb the hierarchy of some established institution. On the contrary, the institution may have been compromised in his eyes. He does not feel so strongly the compulsion to outdo Daddy or the Joneses; he may pay them the supreme insult of ignoring their way of life altogether. Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton speaks of a new kind of "Protean Man" who has been cut adrift from the traditions and expectations of the past. Without moorings, he moves from one activity or ideology to the next in the hope of ultimately finding himself. In a way, today's restless student fits that description.

Then what does he do with his life? What will be his career? He expresses an ardent desire to fulfill himself by helping others. The careers he favors at the moment are social work, psychology, city planning. Poverty work is increasingly popular. VISTA, for example, is swamped with applicants, including 856 graduating law students, or about 5% of the total number finishing law school this spring. Despite all the major objections to U.S. policy in Viet Nam, applications to the Foreign Service continue to rise and those to the Peace Corps remain steady. A desire to avoid the draft figures in the decision of many students to go into teaching; the New York City school system received 17,199 more applications last year than the year before. Nevertheless, many putative draft dodgers find a true vocation in helping slum children learn.

Anti-Business Ethic

This picture can be misleading; while significant, it still involves only a minority. The yearning for "meaningful" careers (in the current cliche) is largely confined to the upper-middle-class white students. The majority of students remain reasonably content with traditional careers. In general, the children of blue-collar workers and Negro students strive to attain the very jobs that many privileged whites disdain. Most students have no special quarrel with the profit motive, and an estimated 30% of all graduates go into business. As a senior at Columbia University puts it: "I think it's great that all the academic virtuosos are turning up their noses at the good business jobs. Let the brains starve in South America while I make $20,000 a year."

It is the virtuosos, though, whom business and law firms are most eager to recruit. They go to unprecedented lengths to court prospects, flying them to the home office, spelling out working conditions in alluring detail. Even if they are due to be drafted or are members of ROTC with a two-year service commitment, they are offered jobs. Sought-after students are in the habit of saying not "I was interviewed" but "I interviewed"--and indeed they did. They can command salaries of $10,000 in the big corporations, $15,000 with Wall Street law firms.

Even that may not be enough to hold them. It took a recent U.C.L.A. graduate only a year to chuck his well-paying job with the typewriter-sales division of IBM. "What really got me," he says, "was one morning when I woke up and started getting dressed. I opened my dresser drawer and realized that I had 16 pairs of charcoal gray socks and no others." This premature disillusionment is symptomatic of the times. After all, the man in the gray flannel suit, symbol of the homogenized organization man a decade ago, did not get discouraged with big business until middle age.

The new attitudes are often based on myth and illusion. One campus recruiter, Vern Tyerman of Pacific Telephone, complains: "The liberal arts student's concept of business is often a turn-of-the-century view: sweat shops, whips, managers with dollar signs on their eye balls." The truth is that in the era of the knowledge explosion, every business worth its profit needs independent-minded, innovative youth. Everything that works in a social sense takes organization -- even serving others on any sort of systematic basis.

Freedom of Affluence

Both the choosiness about careers and the students' idealistic bent are made possible by one common factor: prosperity. Students are the pampered product of the affluent society, the apple of its eye, if sometimes the sty.

DRAWING BY WHITNEY (c) 1966 THE NEW YORKER

The prodigal riches of the U.S. economy unblemished by a recession since 1961 undergird their humanitarian ventures. No one has to starve to be useful these days. Foundations offer grants for all kinds of social proj ects. Certain antipoverty jobs pay as much as $10,500 a year. If a law school graduate wants to spend a year working for VISTA, some firms will give him a second-year salary when he gets out. One of the fastest ways to boost a salary is to switch from business to government and then back again.

Along with affluence, another reason for the new attitude toward careers lies in the forced-draft nature of U.S. education and the widespread rebellion against it. Over the years, ever-growing emphasis had been placed on specialization to prepare "ON THE OTHER students for professions. This was given dramatic impetus when the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957 and the U.S. sharply intensified technical education. Students were subjected to a new competitive scrutiny. What Sociologist Daniel Bell calls the "organizational harness" was slipped on them as soon as it seemed to fit. More advanced college-placement courses were set up in high schools; professional graduate studies encroached on the undergraduate curriculum. After a while, many pressured students, including some of the brightest, cried enough. Where, they wanted to know, was all the specialized education taking them? They began to oppose a "credentials" society in which individuals are largely judged according to test scores and degrees.

Institutional Idiosyncrasy

Their emotional reaction reflected a measure of reality. A second look at specialization has suggested that the generalist is not obsolete after all. Technical knowledge becomes outmoded at a breathtaking rate. It has been estimated that one-half of what an engineer studies in college will be superseded ten years after he graduates. Thus it is more plausible to provide a student with broad concepts into which he can fit the necessary de tails later. Robert Hutchins, for one, has proposed that the college years be devoted exclusively to a liberal education; career skills can be acquired on the job. In effect, many big corporations already maintain impressive educational systems to provide such training.

Ultimately, business and the professions may have to make even greater adjustments to accommodate the new breed of graduates. Many big corporations now use their annual reports to stress their good works as well as their profits. Some top-ranking Manhattan law firms cooperate in programs that allow younger associates to work one night a week in the ghettos and do follow-up work during the day; Baltimore's Piper & Marbury plans to open an office in the ghetto next fall. Idiosyncrasy is no longer suspect. In some areas the man in the turtleneck is beginning to replace the man in the gray flannel suit. Says Michigan Law Review Editor James Martin: "The firms want to make sure that you meet their guys with mustaches and sideburns. They boast about hiring a Negro --or a woman." The universities will probably have to re-emphasize their original function of teaching and reduce the stress on research. Some of the links that have been established with outside business and government may have to be severed. The behavioral-science departments, which have absorbed much of the liberal arts curriculum, might well concentrate more on the moral center of man rather than his peripheral reactions to assorted social stimuli. Even the armed forces are under pressure to change in order to accommodate the new career notions. Enlisted men may never elect their officers, as some rebels propose, but they are quite likely to enjoy expanded rights and a larger measure of legal protection.

Often, students simply do not know much about the careers they choose or discuss. Their prolonged education may give them a distorted view of post-campus life; unrealistic ideas tend to flourish in isolation from society. To help overcome this, an attempt is being made to bring the outside world into the world of studies, to expose a student to a career without harnessing him to it. Already 136 colleges and universities have instituted work-studies programs that provide undergraduates with a taste of a career ahead of time.

But if society is adjusting itself to new ideas about what constitutes a satisfactory life's work, the young, too, will have to make adjustments to certain realities. Their desire for variety is certainly not objectionable --unless it becomes an evasion of choice and of concentration. Protean Man can be self-indulgent. Patience and a command of technique (and of oneself) remain indispensable, particularly to anyone who wishes to reform society. The desire for service is admirable--except when it bespeaks an ill-founded sense of moral superiority and a condescension toward the world at large. It must be realized that "service" can take many forms, even in those professions that are not certified as idealistic.

Fortunately, there is little sense of fatality about a career these days. It is not a life sentence without a reprieve; sentences to labor without love are more easily commuted. Nor do those embarked on careers have to feel that they have left all their education behind them. In mounting numbers, people are returning to college at various points in their lives to acquire new skills or review ancient wisdom. The American promise that any man may be what he chooses is closer to reality than ever before. To choose becomes more arduous when so many prospects are open. But to accomplish anything takes the courage to make a choice--and even to stick with it a little longer than sometimes seems "meaningful."

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