"T

HE rung of a ladder was never meant for a man's foot to rest upon, but only to support him in his progress to a higher rung." "Thus wrote Thomas Henry Huxley of progress in general. The observation is cited here as a specific commentary on the progress of the Employment Service. Its story is an account of progress up a ladder, where the ascent from rung to rung has marked rather clearly defined epochs in the history of a public service.

We stood on the first rung of that ladder when, in the depression years, it was necessary to devote attention to stabilizing a work force at the bottom levels of employment. The man who worked with his hands was the man of the hour. The ability to perform manual labor was often the only essential selection factor to employability, and white collars were readily exchanged for blistered hands.

This was mass placement, a temporary bulwark against mass unemployment.

The agency moved to a second rung with the placement of technical workers in industries and offices revitalized by dollars flowing from the pockets of working people.

Not until war demands necessitated intensive recruitment was our knowledge of skills and crafts more fully recognized and utilized. Effective placement of highly specialized workers during a national crisis moved us up again.

On May 4 of last year, three "new" employment offices were opened in Alabama by the Department of Industrial Relations. They were small-each with a staff of but three individuals: a manager, an interviewer, and a stenographer. But the opening of these offices marked a step to a higher rung than the Em

ployment Service had ever before reached. These offices were opened to give exclusive placement service to veteran and nonveteran graduating college students-professionally trained men and women who will be tomorrow's makers and shapers of industry and its policies.

Alabama, in setting up the Nation's first State-operated Graduate Placement Service, has moved to accomplish another step in "placement penetration" at the professional and managerial level. Following a well-tried system of tapping opportunity at its source, efforts are directed toward placement of college graduates. To a large extent, the development of these career employment opportunities is taken in stride, in connection with our some 7,000 employer visits each month.

The graduate placement program was undertaken with the conviction that the most prolific supply of talent and leadership is in the colleges today. As a placement agency, it should be the responsibility and the privilege of the Employment Service to make readily accessible to industry its richest storehouse of workers. The key to this storehouse is simply a telephone call to the nearest Employment Service office. Alabama employers are being educated to use that key.

Direct Contact With Industry

Two of the graduate placement offices are located on college campuses at the University of Alabama and at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute. Office space and utilities are provided by the schools themselves. The third, housed in the Birmingham professional office, serves the three colleges of that area.

Each office works directly with industry or in conjunction with local offices in Alabama to channel graduating seniors into jobs, where their abilities will best serve the interests of expanding industry in a growing State.

Results of the program cannot be evaluated in terms of direct, quantitative placement volume. A recent placement, for instance, of a personnel director with one of the largest firms in the State is more than a placement. It is, so to speak, one of many placement investments that will pay compound interest in other placements in months and probably years to come.

There are other results, equally significant and equally elusive to an ES-209, "Report of Local Office Activities."

The South could hardly be called a rich section. For a long time it has lost heavily of its trained young people to other areas offering higher salaries and wider industrial horizons. The Graduate Placement Offices have alerted industry to the full import of this loss. A number of firms have raised entrance wage rates and have strengthened promotional policies. Doors to the inner sanctum of top management have opened, in many instances for the first time, to the Employment Service.

Important as a Veteran Service

The program is of particular importance as a veteran service. With veterans constituting a majority of college enrollments which are at an all-time high, job placement presents a special responsibility. The veteran graduating from college today is seasoned by both military and civilian work experience. He merits premium job opportunities. School officials have welcomed assistance in meeting the challenge confronting them.

Publicity has been widespread and constant. The local office field visiting program sounded off with a direct information service to all industries. Personal letters were written to employers throughout the State. The press and radio helped to launch the new service and have given it loyal support since its inception. Leading newspapers of the State have accorded it headline coverage and strong editorial support. Undergraduates are talking about it in frat houses and beneath thetrees of our college campuses. It promises much.

For graduates, it promises accurate information about employment opportunities—about various companies and the relative merits of their promotional policies, insurance provisions, and the prospect of housing facilities and social environment. That is the information the professionally trained person wants before making a choice about a job. Monetary considerations are often less important than the potentialities of a job.

For industry the program promises information about a student; how his grades ran; what student honors he had; what his military record was; his previous work experience; and, most important, how he got along with his professors and his fellow studentshis personal characteristics and adaptability.

How Will the Future Judge Us?

For the Employment Service, it promises a move to a top level position, where effective placement work can seep down to all other levels of employment. The college graduate of today may be the personnel director of tomorrow- or the chief engineer, or the first vice president.

Will he look down the years at a service that helped him to get his start, and at a service that has grown with him grown because he has grown?

The effectiveness of the Graduate Placement Service will answer that question-and determine if our professional status has matured to top-rung calibre.

developing their potentialities whether they live in rural or urban areas. The quality of living afforded by the community in which boys and girls are reared influences the possibilities of their best development. Because of the limitations today of educational and other public services in many rural areas, counseling needs of the youth from rural homes are an urgent problem.

Much progress must be made if we are to fulfill the goal of our democracy that all should share equal opportunity. Per capita expenditure for all public services education, health, welfare-has generally lagged in rural communities where a large proportion of the Nation's youth grow up. Consequently, many rural youth spend their days in out-moded, ill-kept, inadequately equipped schools; in crowded classrooms with poor lighting and ventilating facilities; the teacher may have sub-standard qualifications and teach throughout the year with no supervision. Often these children are in serious need of medical attention,

Farm Security Administration

dental care, and require welfare and guidance services-none of which are available. They become indifferent to school and drop out before they have acquired even the rudiments of an elementary education. Parents, too, are often indifferent to the educational needs of their children. School facilities are strained and educational authorities admit that they can do nothing for the children and youth who will not come to school.

Responsibility for the education and guidance of youth cannot be dismissed as an exclusively local or State problem. American youth are mobile. Rural communities have always been enormous exporters of human resources. Mechanization of agricultural processes is decreasing employment opportunity on the farm and gives impetus to migration. Young people from isolated rural homes need wise guidance to equip them for a satisfying personal life, able citizenship and competence on the job, whether they remain at home or migrate to compete on the home-ground of the urban boy and girl.

Illustrative of the needs of rural youth for more adequate educational guidance and placement services is the situation in South Carolina-a State in which three-fourths of the population is classified as rural. The 1940 Census revealed that 35 percent of the State's population, aged 25 and over, had received under 5 years of grade school or none, 33 percent had completed 5 to 8 years of grade school, 23 percent had completed 1 to 4 years of high school, and 9 percent had completed 1 to 4 years of college or more.

The State Department of Education sought more specific information and tabulated school "drop-outs" beginning with a count of children enrolled in the first grade in the 1936-37 school year and traced the enrollment of this class through the eleventh grade in the 1946-47 school year. The results are shown in the accompanying graph. One-half of the Negro children of the 1936-37 first grade were not in the second grade the following year; less than one-eighth were on hand to enter the eighth grade; only one out of nineteen enrolled in the eleventh grade. Among the white children, one-third disappeared from the fifth grade roll; only one-half entered the eighth grade and less than one-third were with their classmates in the eleventh grade.

The Vocational Guidance Division of the South Carolina State Department of Education keeps this tabulation of "drop-outs" constantly before them.

These tragic figures spell out their guidance job The baffling problem is: What can be done with resources available to adjust the curriculum to the needs of these children so that they will come to school and remain long enough to discover and develop their potentialities?

Another dramatic illustration of the problems of youth is that of Harlan County, Ky.-a ruralindustrial area faced with problems similar to those of South Carolina. Of the 18,000 children, aged 6 to 18 years, on the census rolls, less than 14,000 were enrolled in the 1946-47 school year, and attendance for many of these was irregular. The school people recognize nonattendance as a symptom of many things that are wrong.

How Can the Community Help?

Last spring the Harlan County Public Schools and the County Planning Council wanted to do something about their accumulated problems. They invited the Alliance for Guidance of Rural Youth to help arrange a 4-day conference to focus attention on what the community could do about formulating plans for programs dealing with guidance, vocational adjustment, health, nutrition and child welfare to prevent delinquency. Consultants from the Kentucky State Department of Education and Department of Health and Nutrition, Employment Service, the University of Kentucky and from various U. S. Departments and services in Washington assisted in the planning and participated in the discussion. Recommended programs emerged from the conferences and began to be translated into community action.

The group that discussed "Occupational Outlook and Training of the Boys and Girls" surveyed their problems with a clear eye. Migration of young people away from the county received considerable attention. "Exporting talent" from rural areas was admitted to be costly. It has been estimated that rural districts contribute about $2 billion a year to cities as it costs about $1,500 to rear a boy to 15 years of age. Schools and colleges, it was thought, had aided in educating youth away from rural life instead of training them in the skills needed to do the professional, commercial and industrial jobs required in the social organization and economy of the home community.

The following recommendations were made for guidance of migration:

1. Help each pupil to discover his true abilities and provide him with the kind of education he needs. This requires skillful counseling, supplemented by a minimum test program and in-service training for teachers in guidance techniques.

2. Get occupational information about jobs in the county and its vicinity as well as wider vocational opportunities. Make this information available to teachers, pupils, and parents.

3. Discuss with every pupil his interests, abilities, special talents, previous work and study experience, results of tests, and his attitudes and feelings about

leaving his home community. Help him to make a carefully considered decision about migration.

4. Provide suitable education for youth who stay home and those who move to other regions. Provide basic training and special training for jobs in the county. They should not decide to migrate merely because they do not have skill to do the work in the county or because of superficial reasons.

5. Increase opportunities for employment in the county. Develop new industries using the natural resources of the county. Attract industries to county, if possible, in line with the tendency to decentralize large industries. Make a survey of vocational opportunities and possibilities.

6. Develop a county-wide guidance program and a county-wide training program. Apprenticeship training made an intrinsic part of school education is a promising development. Make available to the schools monthly reports on job opportunities collected by local employment offices.

The special group of the Institute concerned with vocational guidance, and which included representatives of high school students, recognized that, in addition to the heavy out-migration, few young people continued their education beyond high school and too many withdrew from school before completing elementary or high school. It was agreed that needed guidance should accomplish the following: Afford reasonable chance to the individual for the right choice of a field of work; effect an economic saving to the individual as well as the employer; broaden the vision of youth as to opportunities both within and outside the county; inspire confidence as to the individual's fitness and ability to approach prospective employers for employment; and readjust returning veterans and displaced war workers returning to the county. It was also felt that occupational information and guidance should be available on an individual basis at any grade

Children's Bureau, F. S. J. level as need arises, on a group basis beginning with the seventh grade and for out-of-school youth and adults, either individually or in groups; and finally that vocational training facilities were inadequate to meet the needs of all youth in the county.

Immediate and Long-Range Programs

The vocational guidance group recommended both an immediate and long-range program. Immediate steps to be taken in launching the county-wide vocational guidance program called for a meeting of the county school principals to select a high school for a pilot vocational guidance program to be used as a basis for extending a uniform program to all county schools as soon as feasible. The pilot program was to include: (1) Training of selected teachers in fundamental counseling and vocational guidance techniques; (2) establishing an occupational information circulating library with bibliography listed in Teacher's Manual and posted on school bulletin boards; (3) arranging classes in "Occupations"; (4) arranging trips to the Area Trade School and local industries and shops for classes or interested groups; (5) arranging classes in job-hunting techniques for school-leavers; (6) establishing liason with local Employment Service counselor for exchange of occupational and labormarket information, both local and outside the county, which will be incorporated in the classes on "Occupations"; and (7) installing experimental aptitude testing program, using various aptitude tests and interest inventories including those developed by the U. S. Employment Service.

Long-range plans recommended were as follows: (1) Develop a county-wide occupational information and vocational guidance program based on the pilot program developed in carrying out "immediate steps" (2) increase vocational training facilities for in-school