After Harvard: Fame, Fortune, Failure

NORTH OF HARVARD Yard a temple--or a ghetto--has been built for pre-meds. The Undergraduate Science Center opened last year, and like many pre-meds here, the building sits uncomfortably between the domains of the traditional Harvard Science departments. Perhaps it says something about the distances between academic departments that a building as big as the Science Center could fall between them, and perhaps it says something about Harvard that a group of people the size of the local pre-med population could collectively find themselves the uncomfortable step-children of the Chemistry, Biochemistry and Biology Departments at Harvard.

Pre-law and pre-business students do not face the pressures that pre-med students must. Law schools impose their own particular brand of hell--the Law School Aptitude Tests (LSATs)--but it is a much shorter one, lasting only an afternoon, rather than the nine months of Chem 20 (Harvard's frantically competitive organic chemistry course).

Of course, to see the "after Harvard what?" question as a choice between law, medical and business schools is too limited. Although year after year 90 per cent of each graduating class plans to attend a graduate school of some sort, only about 40 per cent go directly to graduate or professional study. Of the 60 per cent who do something else, a bare majority (31 per cent) look for some kind of job.

Students in that 31 per cent are not particularly well-qualified for many jobs. Harvard neither has nor is prepared to offer routine training for pre-medical, pre-law or pre-anything students. Harvard faculty members have never been able to become very excited about teaching vocational courses to undergraduates.

But in the last two years, Harvard undergraduates appear to have become somewhat more interested in taking, vocational courses, at least vocational courses of a sort. This results partly from a growing interest in medicine; partly from a job market that is growing permanently tighter; partly from the evident decay of student interest in other things (such as radical politics); and partly from a complementary trend for Harvard types to look for more private means of satisfaction.

These trends are relatively recent. The job market turned bad with the recession of 1970, but underlying economic conditions make a prolonged condition of structural underemployment for B.A. holders highly probable.

The turn toward pre-med study--Harvard's manifestation of a general national trend into the health professions--is very recent, so recent that OG&CP figures (based on the career preferences of graduating seniors) do not yet show the shift. But enrollment in the pre-med core curriculum have skyrocketed in the last two years, and the pre-med concentrations--biology, biochemistry and chemistry--have grown dramatically. Chem 20 is so big that the Chemistry Department has begun to exclude people from it.

The third agent contributing to students' increased vocational interest--the decay of political consciousness--is perhaps the most obvious, but also the most difficult factor to define. Certainly the style of the Harvard student has changed markedly in the last ten years, but his vocational inclinations do not seem to have undergone a parallel shift. Before, during and after the strikes of 1960 and 1970 about the same number of seniors planned to become lawyers and doctors.

But in the absence of any political commitment, students seem more careerists, whether or not they actually are. In a not particularly political atmosphere, it becomes easier for an undergraduate to admit and discuss the compromises he will make when he graduates. That kind of discussion has a way of bothering the fastidious, even if it reflects no real change.

WHERE THERE has been a real change is in the job market. The Harvard A.B. is no longer the final degree for the economic elite.

With the advent of mass higher education, a bachelor's degree is not worth what it once was--it has lost its scarcity value. Even the Harvard A.B. is not the magic carpet to success and fortune that some people once thought it was. Nowadays it certainly isn't the sure-fire ticket into a law or medical school--which it once really was.

For anyone at Harvard to cash in on his sheepskin, the figures are a little discouraging. In the 1970s, 10 million B.A. degrees will be granted, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Through retirements about 3 million jobs currently held by college graduates will open up to new employees.

Economic expansion will generate another 3 million jobs comparable to those already held by college graduates. These jobs will be primarily in government and health services.

But a third of the 10 million newly-minted college graduates will be employed in jobs that the BLS euphemistically claims will be "upgraded." Upgraded jobs are jobs previously held by non-college graduates: clerical jobs, sales jobs, para-professional jobs. The country is apparently headed for a bad case of structural underemployment-large numbers of people will be overqualified for the positions available to them.

Francis D. Fisher, director of the Office of Career Services and Off-Campus Learning, believes that these figures may be over optimistic, and that the number of underemployed college graduates may reach 4 or 5 million by the end of the decade.

Fisher also said that--although he doubts many Harvard graduates will end up on the bottom of the heap, permanently filing insurance policies under "H"--he expects a "bumping process" to reach right on up the line. Harvard College seniors will face more competition for jobs, and often they will have to settle for less desirable positions.

He also predicted that "bumping" would affect the prospects for Harvard professional school graduates: "In five years, the lower half of a Harvard Law School class isn't going to get the kind of offers we got when I got out."

According to Fisher, the Harvard undergraduate "doesn't know these figures, but he's got a feel for the problem." Harvard students may not analyze general economic trends, but they do a fine job reflecting them. Unfortuantely, reflecting general economic trends can be a little painful, especially when the economy is tight or the competition for places is growing worse.

THE PRE-MED students at Harvard are probably worst caught in the squeeze, since the competition for med school places is bad. They are the students who must take vocational training while in college--the five courses all medical schools require of applicants.

Since all pre-meds meet each other in head-to-head competition in those five courses, they can become real cutthroat experiences. Even after discounting stories of pre-meds sabotaging each other's labs, the degree of competition and amount of emotion involved in the courses is apalling.

And the stories contribute to the generally bad reputation pre-meds acquire. The stereotype of a pre-med as an incredibly competitive, point-grubbing individual who is in medicine for the money may miss the mark. But anyone who agressively advertises himself as a pre-med will probably be detested.

Terry Walsh, of the Bureau of Study Counsel and Currier House's new pre-med advisor, divides pre-meds into three groups. The first encompasses people who are genuinely interested in the natural sciences, plan to go to medical school, and are in no way troubled by the pre-med requirements because they would take the courses anyway.

The second set of people includes those not interested in the natural sciences, who take their pre-med requirements in a fifth year as a special student. By concentrating in an area he genuinely likes, this pre-med will presumably compile a better track record than he would if he studied in one of the areas traditionally thought to appeal to med schools (such as biology or chemistry).

Walsh emphasized that medical schools do not discriminate against applicants who concentrate outside the natural sciences, and that following one's own inclinations would probably enhance the chances of getting into medical school, insofar as it resulted in a better transcript.

Walsh's third class of pre-meds is the group that slipped into a science major only because the prospect of fulfilling concentration requirements and pre-med requirements with the same set of courses seemed economical. They end up in their concentration without ever really deciding to enter it.

"I would not put my money on these people," Walsh said. "A student will blow half his education before he realizes he should sit down and think about what he wants to do."

Pre-law students are less likely than pre-meds to fall into the trap of seeking a surrogate for the sorts of activity they will be doing in professional school. Law school admissions usually depend on grade point average and law board scores. Potential lawyers are not expected to take any particular set of courses, which eliminates one source of the tensions pre-meds face; and law school admissions are not as competitive as medical school admissions, which mitigates another source of pressure.

An additional factor distinguishes the medical school applicant situation from that of the law school applicant. Law school is becoming a place to go to avoid making a career choice.

Although the number of seniors telling OG&CP that their eventual vocation will be law has remained the same for ten years, the number of people planning to go to law school has increased by 50 per cent in the same ten years. As one House pre-law advisor remarked, "They [students] see Howard Cosell on television and want to become a lawyer."

WHAT ALL THIS means to Harvard is not clear yet. In part, the University must face the problem of reconciling its commitment to a liberal arts education with the demands being make upon its graduates. The problems pre-meds face in the five courses they must take to apply to medical school are the most pressing in this area. Harvard's faculty has never and probably never will be very receptive to teaching vocationally oriented courses on a large scale, but the pre-meds have a specific set of problems that must be dealt with.

The traditional idea of a liberal arts education has been progressively mangled by competing educational theories, and the contention that pre-professional grounding in a traditional academic discipline like undergraduate training to be a historian constitutes a liberal arts education is unlikely to prevail.

All parties agree that the Harvard undergraduate education must become more useful to the student, although not necessarily more useful economically. Like most Harvard debates, the issue will probably be resolved on some middle ground: giving pre-meds more help with their particular problems, doing nothing at all for the potential blue-collar workers in each Harvard class, and cooperating with the professional schools in devising more and more quantitative ways to measure each students success.

But the College faces one problem that is its own, as an institution, and which the students wanting to get a job or into medical school needn't worry about directly. For the first time since 1636, Harvard doesn't produce the end product of the educational mill. Most of its students get their final polish somewhere else. George Orwell went to Eton but did not then attend a British university, a procedure which today seems odd. In a few years, it may seem as odd to go to Harvard College and then not attend a graduate school of some sort.