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From Labor Action, Vol. 14 No. 16, 17 April 1950, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Every year over half a million students are graduated from high schools and colleges and enter the market for jobs. Here are young pepole who have spent between 12 and 16 years in school looking forward to the time when they can graduate and find a job. But the job prospects this year are the worst since 1940, the year the American economy emerged out of the Great Depression with the aid of European war orders.
The extent of this problem was pointed out in a speech by Ewan Claque, commissioner of labor statistics in the Department of Labor, reported in the April 2 N.Y. Times. He pointed out that employment prospects for recent school graduates are worse than they have been at any time since the end of the war. He also added that the situation will not be any better in 1951 or 1952.
This problem is not one that faces the young alone. It is also one facing the older workers who, interestingly enough, are called “superannuated”—in other words, too old for speedup.
But what is the answer to this growing unemployment that faces the student? The best that Ewan Clague has to offer is that those who cannot find jobs ought to look for work in related fields (which also do happen not to exist). The other solution is that they “continue in school for post-graduate work.” What better opportunity can there be at that later time, since Clague himself says that the situation will not improve by 1952?
This brings one to the attitude expressed by another politician discussing this same problem. He is William J. Wallin, chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, speaking at a dinner in honor, appropriately enough, of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, president of Columbia University.
William Wallin is particularly concerned that there are too many young people who are in college getting an education. In fact he believes it to be a great danger to present American society.
He is quoted in the March 30 N.Y. Times:
“We are likely to educate, particularly in the post-graduafe area, many more men and women than can earn a living in the field in which they have chosen to be educated, and too often anywhere else, [my emphasis – S.F.] and we shall find that, embittered with their frustration, these surplus graduates will turn upon society and the government, more effective and better armed in their destructive wrath by the education we have given them.”
Here is a thinly clad appeal for the restriction of higher education. American capitalism, the richest and the most powerful in the world, is unable to offer anything to those it educates in order to keep itself functioning with the necessary technicians and intellectuals.
Here is a thinly clad appeal for ignorance of the masses, from one who is a leading figure in the American educational system. Here is the fear that this growing “surplus” will challenge the very basis of the society that educates them in order to throw them on the unemployment list. Therefore, why “more effectively and fetter arm” them? Better: keep them in ignorance, or rather raise them to the educational level sufficient to go little beyond reading and writing, but do not encourage them to think.
This closely parallels the development of capitalism as an industrial society. Capitalism produces more than the market can.use and thus finds it necessary to curtail production and throw workers out of jobs. It expanded the forces of production at one time, but it is a system that cannot fully utilize them, except for war or the consequences of the war. And this surplus, both of the capacity to. produce and the fruits of production, exists as a danger to the system.
Many students today are afraid to join radical campus organizations for fear that it will hurt their chances of getting a job later on. But there is a growing number who are courageous enough to speak out, not only to criticize the system which cannot .provide them with jobs, but also on the issue of academic freedom for non-conformist views and on the cold war itself.
It is out of such situations as this that there will come fhe beginnings of a student movement comparable to the one, that existed in the 30s. Mr. Wallin does indeed have something to fear from the campus.
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