Sharks, Suckers, Flying Fish

WANT A HIGH-SALARIED JOB?

TAKE THE ROAD TO SUCCESS.

EARN $8,000 A YEAR.

Over such glowing phrases in the advertisements of commercial correspondence schools, Psychologists Charles Bird and Donald G. Paterson of the University of Minnesota last week scattered a pamphletful of statistical ashes.

Questioned and tested in the University's Employment Stabilization Research Institute were 294 men, one-third of them employed, who had tried or were trying to improve their occupational status by correspondence study. Most of them had been between 20 and 30 when they enrolled. Their courses had cost from $40 to $240, with an average of $120. But of 235 students who had definitely stopped studying, only 6% had finished their courses. Two-fifths had dropped out during the first year, two-thirds by the fifteenth month.

Stoutly the researchers defended their subjects as average citizens, in no sense "down-&-outers." Records of employed men tallied closely with those of the jobless. Why had they quit? After his survey of clerks trying to become executives; laborers, engineers; mechanics, accountants. Professor Paterson observed: "At the bottom of the sea . . . sharks perhaps are busy organizing the suckers into schools for the purpose of teaching them to become flying fish."

Of the men who aimed to master the intricacies of accounting, 23% ranged in academic ability between the average seventh-grader and the high school junior. To the study of electrical engineering, architecture and chemical engineering, only 20% of the Minnesota aspirants had brought high-school training. More than one-sixth had not finished grade school. Considerably less than half of the would-be advertising men, lawyers, executives had finished high school.

The researchers could not determine how many of their subjects had actually got jobs as a result of their correspondence study. But they did find that only one in six listed as his chief occupation the field of his study while only one in four had ever been employed in that field. Mental and manual tests indicated that 78% of the students would be misfits if they should succeed in getting the jobs for which they studied.

Concluded the researchers: "If correspondence schools would set up personnel bureaus and avail themselves of measuring instruments whereby adult students could be guided to suitable courses, their courses of training would meet a sorely felt need in the field of adult education. Until they undertake this service, efforts of the hit-or-miss variety coupled with intensive advertising and sales campaigns must continue to brand most of these schools as merely profit-making institutions. And of more serious import, they are contributing to the formation of an unhappy and maladjusted citizenry."

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