Why then, Clark asks, should the placement office have to tell students what jobs to take or not to take. "It all boils down," he says, "to whether you believe in the 'directive' or 'non-directive' approach."

Clark's 'non-direction' adds up to a great deal of hard work on the part of the student. Basically, it means he will have to find the company or other organization for which he ends up working on his own. Clark and his staff will set the man on the right road, but will leave finding the right address to him.

Many critics think this "self-service" counselling demands too much of the student. They feel a placement office should size up a man, tell him into what work he should go, and then end up finding his job for him.

Students, themselves, write in many irate letters to complain that the office puts too little emphasis on specific placement. One student sent such a letter last September. He charged that the office was over-staffed--it has four graduates of girls' college, in addition to Clark--and its methods were useless. He came in later, however, and after working for two months with the same methods, landed a 'plum' job.

Many alumni feel the same way as the student critics, they ask why the College cannot do so much placing as Yale does, and enviously point to the Yale Club of New York, which employs a full-time official to hunt jobs for graduates.

Some Employers Opposed

Many employers are dubious too. J.E. Smith, employment manager for the Armstrong Cork Company of Lancaster, Penn, is one. Basically, he thinks that college placement offices like Harvard's, make recruiting for companies impractical.

Smith writers: "Comparatively few companies can justify conducting interviews with all interested candidates individually. They do not have sufficient personnel requirements to do so." He would like to see two big improvements on the Harvard system; first "the use of standardized student application forms, and second, "an adequate alumni placement service, that can bring an alumnus and his job into focus through personal discussion and re-evaluation of his position ... and thereby assist materially in reducing useless and costly turnover for both the alumnus and the company."

Clark admits his office puts comparatively little emphasis on job-getting. But he thinks the tools and information he offers students eventually become far more valuable to them than a job. Even so, he feels that Harvard's placing facilities, such as its arranging of company interviews, and its enormous business contacts, compare well with those of other colleges.

Scoffers Becoming Fewer

He thinks that if students go elsewhere, it is because they have not used the office correctly. For instance, he keeps a large bulletin board covered with several hundred notices of job openings. The sole purpose of the board is to give students a rough idea of what jobs are being offered, and incoming men are specifically advised not to use it for other reasons. Yet one student came to the office almost daily last summer, and read the board to find a job. Seeing a company he liked, he would at once ask Clark to arrange an interview for him. He would then go to see his potential employer, knowing no more than his name and address. Inevitably, he never landed a job. After spending three futile months, this way, he finally left the office, blaming its policies for all his failures.

Clark thinks that companies are beginning to realize that his self-counselling approach pays off. He attributes this to his letting students work out their own problems, and also to his evaluating their personal ability and liking for a job.

"From the company's standpoint." Clark says, "this means its personnel men can rely on their Harvard recruits turning out happy in their jobs, and not wanting to leave as soon as they find out what is expected of them--something that men often do only at the end of an expensive company training course."

This job contentment appears to be in sharp contrast to what happens at some colleges. For example, Michigan's placement bureau says it has a bigger alumni than undergraduate program. Clark thinks this "raises the suspicion" that a great many of those placed don't like the jobs they got. It also implies they never did enough thinking on job-getting while they were in college, and so have to go back to their old college placement office.

The University has a strong supporter of its ideas in Princeton, Gordon C. Sikes, director of the bureau there, says: "Most of the men registered with us use the Bureau as a source of information only. For example, we can count on 40 percent of each Senior class going to graduate school. We have about 700 seniors on year, and probably half of these men use the Bureau either for possible lead or for the active job of interviewing.