Excerpts from an account appearing in the current World's Work of the Graduate School of Business Administration read as follows:

"It is a laboratory school where the materials with which the student works are the financial records, the organization, the buying and selling systems, the management, and the physical equipment, layout, and operation of actual, specified factories, stores, railroads. The student himself not only visits many of these going concerns, but he spends days and sometimes weeks in a careful study of the layout and operation of a manufacturing plant, the management of a department store, the buying and selling system of a concern--in short, every sort of problem that has to be handled by the business manager. He is made familiar through his personal investigations, as well as by the teaching of his instructors, with the mechanism of modern business; he is trained in the modern scientific methods of investigating business facts and of solving the problems that they present.

"In the Harvard Business School the student begins where the man who is 'learning the business' hopes to end. He begins by studying, comparing, and criticising the systems and methods that different concerns make use of for accomplishing the same general purposes. He has greater advantages than the man who grows up with the business; for he does not get his knowledge of factory organization, for example, from a single factory routine in which he is immersed, but from dozens of factories, some of which may be more efficient than the one which holds the young man who is learning the business.

"The Harvard plan for business training is, therefore, to equip the young man with a knowledge of the machinery of actual business, both broadly and in detail; to tell him, and also to let him learn from his own investigations, how different business managers have tried to solve various problems; to train him in scientific methods of investigating and interpreting business facts; and then to send him into actual business as an employee. The Harvard School expects its graduates to begin their active business experience as subordinates. It expects them to spend some time--a few years--in mastering the routine, the personnel, the organization, markets, and finance of the particular business that they enter. But it sends every graduate into this practical experience equipped with a knowledge of business principles and mechanisms that will make him understand from the start the relation of his particular job to the whole scheme; and this knowledge ought to make his advance more rapid than that of the young man who begins without this preparation. The school realizes that the business leader must have aptitude, character, initiative; and that no sort of instruction or experience will make good the absence of these native qualities in the student. But for young men of the right natural quality it believes that its training should shorten a good deal the path to high executive positions; and that its graduates, when they have reached those positions, will be more efficient by reason of their broader training than are the men of the same quality who have had to take the longer and narrower path of growing up with the business.

"The many business men that were consulted by the Harvard authorities said that they had constant difficulty in getting men who were qualified to become their executive officers. As they explained the matter, the trouble was that most young men who started to grow up with the business got caught in the trades of business, fell into ruts, got smothered with the 99 per cent. of the routine, and so never acquired a grasp of the whole business; and those who did learn enough of all sides of the business were apt to complete their knowledge when they were too old, or too inelastic and lacking in enterprise and resourcefulness, to be given important executive positions. 'Business,' which was giving the only 'full course' in preparation for the profession of business, confessed that its own method of teaching was not a success.

"That the Harvard School is fulfilling its aim-- to teach the profession of business by scientific methods applied to live business material--is made evident by several signs. Its increasing student body, numbering now, in its sixth year, 109, has every year included a notable representation of active business men in executive positions who have come to it for special courses of instruction. The interest of the business world has taken a new form in frequent inquiries from employers concerning men that may be available in the graduating class. Positions are secured for practically all graduates, though the school does not promise this. Every graduate is practically assured a fair chance to prove his fitness for executive work, and to be put ahead if he 'makes good.' The professorship of banking and finance has been made permanent by the gift of endowment from a business man, Mr. Edmund C. Converse, of New York. The Harvard Corporation, as well as the business supporters of the school, consider that it has passed from experiment to assured success.

"Harvard seems to have found the men, the methods, and the beginning of notable achievement in making the profession of business more scientific and more efficient--in bringing business nearer to its proper place as an applied science."