Robert C. Hosmer, vice president and general manager of the Excelsior Insurance Company of New York, was looking to hire a new insurance salesman in 1935. He sent an inquiry to the director of the Harvard University Alumni Placement Service, James F. Dwinell, whom he had come to know over many years of correspondence about prospective employees. An Excelsior salesman was to be a “good mixer” and a “gentlemen” with a “good personality.”Footnote 1 Dwinell replied to Hosmer on March 11, 1935 with “a possibility for you”:
Dear Bob … Burns graduated in ‘28 and is now 31 years old. While in college he was pretty active in extra-curricular affairs. He played on the baseball team three years, being Captain in his Senior Year, was on the track team three years, and was on the football team his Senior Year. He was a member of the Hasty Pudding, the Institute, and the Varsity Club … He [strikes] me as being a bright, energetic, rather attractive young man. His father was a Nova Scotian and the family are Protestants.Footnote 2
This exchange was one of thousands of letters between employers and the placement office of Harvard University between 1897 and 1940. During these years, the world of business dramatically transformed from small family enterprises to large corporations with vast bureaucracies made up of dozens or hundreds of white-collar staff. Simultaneously, training for business occupations also changed. In the late nineteenth century, merchants and proprietors learned business through an informal apprenticeship alongside a practitioner, and few had formal education beyond high school. In the emerging corporate economy of the early twentieth century, the college degree became a salient credential for a new class of managers and executives. According to one national survey, in 1900 fewer than 20 percent of American business leaders were college graduates, yet just decades later, for those who became leaders between 1921 and 1940, over 50 percent had secured this now-crucial credential.Footnote 3
A wave of recent studies of the “corporatization” of American universities has traced the ways in which universities adopted corporate management practices, vocationalized their curricula, and reimagined their students as consumers. These narratives tend to focus on developments after the 1970s, corresponding to the neoliberal turn in US politics and increasing social inequality, in contrast to a mid-twentieth-century “golden age” when the culture of the university was supposedly antithetical to the world of commerce.Footnote 4 The rise of the modern university and the corporate economy, however, were already inextricably linked by the early twentieth century. To understand this deep entanglement of universities in the modern economy, this study refocuses our attention on this earlier period between 1890 and 1940.
Universities and the emerging corporate order were interconnected in numerous ways. As scholars have documented, major industrialists made enormous donations of their private wealth to universities, providing much of the capital of this expanding sector.Footnote 5 Historians have also traced the circulation of new scientific knowledge between the academic and industrial world, fueling new research disciplines and management techniques.Footnote 6 Fewer studies, however, focus on the role of universities in training a new cohort of business managers and executives. While some scholarship notes the influx of college graduates into industry and associated cultural shifts, the ties that facilitated the placement of graduates into business remain underexplored.Footnote 7 College placement services have not received significant attention in any major histories of higher education or business.Footnote 8 This article builds on our knowledge of the links between higher education and corporations by focusing on the nexus of formal placement services that directly mediated between universities and corporate sectors.
The world of universities was hardly autonomous from developments occurring outside its exclusive boundaries. Long-standing institutional “silos” within educational history—between higher and secondary education, between public and private education, and between educational institutions and the political economy—are still only beginning to break down.Footnote 9 By reinterpreting major curricular and institutional changes as responses to a changing political economy and landscape of schooling, I argue that elite university leaders expanded and formalized their placement services—a practice pioneered much earlier by proprietary institutions—in order to maintain their institutional position of prestige within an increasingly competitive landscape. In the face of the rapid expansion and feminization of white-collar work, growing immigrant political power, and the rise of institutional competitors in the form of proprietary “commercial colleges” and public high schools, university leaders and alumni grew concerned with the stability of their political and economic influence. Universities deliberately reoriented themselves to the corporate world to help construct new career paths for their graduates that came to define the corporate occupational structure itself. In so doing, not only did corporate culture shape universities, but universities also played a key role in shaping the particular form of American corporate capitalism.Footnote 10
In facilitating employment pathways for their graduates, universities incorporated technical knowledge as well as cultural norms and personal characteristics into the meaning of educational merit. Universities developed placement services not only to help their graduates find high-paying jobs, but also to cultivate an institutional reputation based on the forms of knowledge and behaviors as well as the gender, racial, religious, and class-based characteristics employers preferred. Under a meritocratic guise, these network-building services reproduced a wealthy, white, male stratum of college-educated business leaders. This historical account thus reveals the ways in which the “human capital” paradigm dominant in economics and the “cultural capital” and “credentialism” paradigms in sociology each capture partial facets of education's role in the labor market.Footnote 11 While economic historians have documented discriminatory employment practices, and studies of discrimination within universities have explored internal policies, virtually none have explored the intermediary role of placement services.Footnote 12 By assisting or hindering their graduates' employment options, universities shaped the composition of elites beyond their walls, and employers found a reliable service to deliver the type of “college man” they preferred to have join their offices and boardrooms.
This article explores the making of a new corporate elite by focusing on institutional developments in the city of Boston. States in the Northeast had some of the highest rates of public school enrollment and a rich institutional ecology of proprietary schools and private degree-granting universities.Footnote 13 The Boston metropolitan area was a financial and industrial center with long-standing ties between economic and cultural elites. While unique, the city's competitive landscape of schools and the corresponding transformation of Boston's economic elite make it an ideal city to trace their coevolution. In addition, elite universities like Harvard used their placement services and alumni to exert their influence nationally, and thus played a central role in converting a regional, New England-based elite into a national-level corporate managerial class. Studying the evolving relationship of universities and elites in this city thus provides insight into the broader development of American corporate capitalism.
In this account, I first describe the competitive landscape of business training between 1890 and 1940. These institutions enabled striking transformations of gender and ethnicity in the business world at large, but among the economic elite, the demographic profile remained stubbornly similar. I argue that elite universities used placement services to ensure their position at the top of the educational and economic hierarchy. Through the correspondence of placement officers, employers, and the words of college graduates themselves, I demonstrate the active construction of a new professional corporate class and the criteria of merit on which this class was evaluated. The successful marriage of university credentials and corporate managers helped give rise to a new, credential-based form of social inequality that continues to structure the American political economy.
The Competitive Landscape of Business Training
In the late nineteenth century, Boston's economic elite was made up of bankers, brokers, merchants, traders, and manufacturers, most of whom owned small firms, often run by several members of the same family. Access to these positions was not rooted in formal education. Out of the fifteen business leaders in Boston between the ages of thirty and forty-five featured in Men of Progress in 1896, about half had received only a grammar school education.Footnote 14 One continued on to a normal school, three to high school, one to a proprietary “business college,” and one to a drafting school. Only one entered Harvard College—Frederick Prince, the son of a Boston mayor—but he dropped out to pursue business opportunities and became a successful banker. None earned a four-year college degree. While Boston's “Brahmin” caste of financial and professional elites developed ties to liberal arts colleges like Harvard, most businessmen were ambivalent about the “college man,” whom they considered condescending and impractical.Footnote 15 Henry Dennison, a Harvard graduate in 1899 who became president of a paper product company founded by his grandfather, described the “typical slang” businessmen used to refer to college graduates: “‘He knows it all,’ ‘He hasn't got his feet on the earth,’ ‘He isn't willing to get his hands dirty,’ ‘He expects good things passed to him on a silver platter.’”Footnote 16 Many professors, such as economist Thorstein Veblen, were eager to distinguish their emerging academic enterprises from the vulgar world of profit-seeking and disdained vocational subjects like business.Footnote 17
Pathways into positions of business leadership, however, underwent a dramatic change during this period. Small firms run by a few family members persisted but were overshadowed by large manufacturing corporations, chain stores, and financial services companies.Footnote 18 These corporations developed internal bureaucracies staffed by clerks, bookkeepers, stenographers, sales workers, secretaries, managers, and executives. The hiring needs of these bureaucracies overstretched the informal ties that had guided previous personnel decisions, and new layers of management were devoted to personnel policies. In Boston, the Manufacturers' Research Association of Massachusetts was founded in 1920 by over a dozen of the largest Boston-area manufacturing firms for the “pooling of business information and experience to the end that excellence in the science of management achieved by one member can accrue to the good of the group.”Footnote 19 Personnel management was a primary focus. Personnel departments boomed nationally after World War I: in 1915, fewer than one in twenty firms with over 250 employees had personnel departments, while in 1929, over one-third did.Footnote 20
These changes in business management have been detailed by economic historians, but few focus on the institutions that trained the staff of corporate bureaucracies.Footnote 21 Educational institutions became attractive to growing firms as a means of preselecting potential employees. Men and women seeking employment in new white-collar jobs fueled the growth of a largely unregulated, competitive landscape of schools eager to promote their services.
Proprietary commercial schools, also known as “commercial colleges” or “business colleges,” were the first on the scene to take advantage of a growing market for business training in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 22 These schools tended to attract middle-class, second-generation immigrants who could afford a small fee for a few months of practical training, but who did not have the social networks to enter business informally.Footnote 23 Proprietary commercial schools pioneered placement services: as early as 1853, Comer's Commercial College catalog listed all graduates who were “now in good situations in Boston and the vicinity, mostly procured on Mr. Comer's recommendation,” and the subsequent year explicitly listed “employment” as a school service.Footnote 24 These schools made extensive use of the testimonials of grateful alumni in their promotional materials. “The position you obtained for me … is everything that could be desired,” “many thanks for the situation obtained for me,” “accept my thanks … for the position you secured for me on leaving” were just some of the quotes featured in the 1893 catalog of Boston's Burdett College of Business and Shorthand.Footnote 25
As white-collar work expanded and partially feminized after 1890, women became the drivers of commercial school growth. Between 1880 and 1925, Bryant & Stratton Commercial School, the largest proprietary commercial school in Boston, grew from 375 men and only 50 women students to 368 men and 837 women students. After taking courses in penmanship, bookkeeping, accounting, business correspondence, and shorthand, Bryant & Stratton graduates entered the middle ranks of business as accountants, stenographers, secretaries, and mid-level managers.Footnote 26 Dozens of proprietary schools, ranging from well-established institutions to single educational entrepreneurs, proliferated in the early twentieth century.Footnote 27 Some were profit-seeking scams, but many offered essential services to which their students would not otherwise have had access.Footnote 28
By the early twentieth century, even more diverse institutions had joined the market for business training in Boston. By 1900, public pressure helped propel public high schools to expand their commercial offerings (including bookkeeping, stenography, and commercial arithmetic). Women and second-generation immigrants took advantage of these options in high schools in the greatest numbers.Footnote 29 Degree-granting colleges and universities also moved into the market for collegiate business training. Nationwide, the first bachelor's degree in business, a “bachelor of finance,” was offered by the Wharton School of Finance and Economy in Philadelphia in 1881; in Boston, the YMCA's School of Commerce and Finance offered a “bachelor of commercial science” degree in 1911.Footnote 30 Collegiate business programs were more prestigious than a non-degree-granting commercial school, but less exclusive than a classical liberal arts college. Enrollment in private women's colleges was also on the rise, and more women graduates chose employment as secretaries over teaching.Footnote 31 In response, many proprietary commercial schools, pressured from public high schools below and degree-granting schools from above, refashioned themselves as postsecondary professional schools. While nearly all lacked state-chartered degree-granting authority, they increasingly competed with degree-granting institutions.Footnote 32 They also promoted their graduates more aggressively: by 1923, Burdett College was sending bulletins to local employers with their graduates' photos, interests, and personal characteristics, headlining “If any man here interests you, get in touch with Burdett College at once, because the number becomes fewer each week.”Footnote 33
These new training institutions made possible dramatic demographic shifts in Boston's business sector. Among all proprietors and managers in Boston between 1880 and 1940, first- and second-generation immigrants rose from 30 percent to 64 percent, the greatest proportion of them Russian Jewish immigrants.Footnote 34 The fastest-growing economic sector in Boston, and nationwide, was clerical and sales work, which grew from 15 percent to 25 percent of Boston's male workforce and 6 percent to 32 percent of its female workforce between 1880 and 1940. Women, choosing these clerical and sales work over domestic service, factory work, or teaching, quickly came to dominate these jobs, which became majority female in Boston by 1930.Footnote 35 The majority of these women and second-generation immigrants were trained in public high schools and proprietary commercial schools.Footnote 36
Among business leaders, however, the story is one of continuity. Financial and business elites never made up more than a few percentage points of the entire male workforce in Boston.Footnote 37 Corporate managers and executives were almost exclusively native-born white men, mostly Episcopalian and Presbyterian, with long roots in the Northeast. In a study of two hundred CEOs of leading US firms in 1917, less than 1 percent were Catholic, and less than 0.5 percent were Jewish. Over one-third had parents who were also company executives, and less than 1 percent had fathers who were manual workers.Footnote 38 While Jewish businessmen did enter into the top ranks of the corporate world, they did not surpass 10 percent of business leaders in the Northeast before 1950 and remained heavily segregated socially. Irish or Italian Catholics remained only a small percentage, and African Americans, Asian Americans, and women were almost entirely excluded.Footnote 39
The demographic stability of the economic elite belies their active efforts to maintain their position in a competitive environment. The relationships they forged with exclusively male liberal arts colleges and research universities proved mutually beneficial. Universities provided the institutional basis and cultural prestige to a new milieu of business elites, and a reorientation to the business world allowed these institutions to stay competitive in a crowded educational landscape.
Liberal Arts for “Captains of Industry”
Until well into the twentieth century, the institution that trained the vast majority of male college graduates in the Boston area was Harvard College.Footnote 40 Although many sons of Boston's mercantile and financial elite were educated in the college's classical curriculum, the primary orientation of Harvard College in the mid-nineteenth century was to the learned professions. The groundwork for an institutional shift toward business was laid in 1869, when alumni of the college, including many business leaders, gained control of Harvard's board of overseers. This new board helped secure the appointment of Charles W. Eliot, assistant professor of chemistry at MIT, as president to reform the university.Footnote 41 Over the next decades, Eliot would play a key role in reorienting the undergraduate curriculum to “modern” subjects, increasing the scientific research capacity of the university, and formalizing professional education. While earning the disdain of some classical educators who believed “vocational” training should be no part of a liberal education, Eliot believed any subject was worthy of study at its highest levels: “We would have them all, and at their best.”Footnote 42
Eliot was not opposed to business education on principle, but by the 1890s, as enrollment in proprietary commercial schools surged, he became one of the most outspoken critics of these institutions. In 1899 he called them “sham institutions” that “outrageously abused the name ‘college’ to which none of them had any right.”Footnote 43 His criticism mirrored that of other civic and university leaders across the country who condemned the practices of proprietary schools—the use of solicitors, guarantees of employment, lack of prerequisites—in numerous reports.Footnote 44 Eliot instead supported what he called an “upper commercial school” that was “parallel with a college or scientific school” to train a middle tier of businessmen (not businesswomen) in occupations such as public accountants, merchants, managers, and foreign consuls.Footnote 45 Based on this description, he likely looked approvingly at new collegiate-level business schools like Wharton to train a middle stratum of businessmen. For an even more exclusive class of “captains of industry,” however, Eliot believed that a liberal arts college education was the best preparation.Footnote 46 This curriculum, which he implemented at Harvard, included a flexible elective system in which students could specialize within natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and foreign languages. Eliot also supported the organization of business-related courses for undergraduates, such as Principles of Accounting in 1900.Footnote 47
With remarkable speed at the turn of the twentieth century, the small minority of Harvard college graduates entering business grew into a majority. In 1897, 15–20 percent of graduates entered positions in business; by 1908, 50 percent did.Footnote 48 Business far outnumbered any other occupational choice among graduating seniors and remained the most popular area of employment for the next decades, only temporarily dropping to 30 percent during the Great Depression.Footnote 49 This massive influx of graduates into business was facilitated by the activities of Harvard's placement office.
The Harvard Alumni Placement Service
College graduates had long relied on informal connections through their classmates or professors to secure employment. In fields such as engineering and physics, where highly technical knowledge was required, employers would continue to rely on professors for direct recommendations, even after formal placement services developed.Footnote 50 University placement offices, however, soon took over the majority of placement coordination. The Harvard “Appointment Committee” was founded in 1897, primarily to assist students seeking appointments as college professors and high school teachers.Footnote 51 This office coordinated with the Harvard Alumni Association for students seeking business positions, and the latter branch quickly outpaced the former.Footnote 52 By 1912, teaching and business placement services split in two. While male staff officially directed business placement, the bulk of the work was carried out by an “appointment secretary”—a female college graduate named Ruth Mork—who served in this capacity for twenty-two years.Footnote 53 Over the next decades, the alumni branch of the Appointment Committee placed one hundred to two hundred graduates each year into business-related positions. With around four hundred students in each graduating class of the college between 1900 and 1917, these placements made up a substantial proportion of each class.Footnote 54
Despite their criticisms of proprietary schools as vulgar and vocational, universities like Harvard adopted many of the same practices, placement services among them. Long-standing institutions had the advantage of ready access to a much larger pool of alumni contacts. The Harvard Alumni office developed relationships with hundreds of employers, coordinating with Harvard clubs across the United States.Footnote 55 While the heaviest concentration of employer contacts were in New England, where over half of all graduates in the 1920s remained, the office made a concerted effort to “nationalize” their placement service after 1925.Footnote 56 The Great Depression provoked a renewed interest in and devotion of resources to placement services for students entering a depressed labor market. From a small staff of one secretary and stenographer in 1898, the office expanded into the Alumni “Placement Service” in 1929, which included three male supervisors, two male directors, and two female staff.Footnote 57 This office created a special bulletin to send to employers throughout the country—matching that of Burdett College—advertising registered candidates, including academic record, extracurricular activities, family background, race, religion, personal appearance (including height and weight), and personality.Footnote 58 This national outreach facilitated the disproportionate impact of a few universities like Harvard on the emerging corporate scene.
New professional associations helped facilitate the connections between college placement officers and company personnel departments, in the process establishing male dominance over the emerging profession. While the National Association of Appointment Secretaries (NAAS) was founded in 1924 by women serving as placement secretaries, including Harvard's own Ruth Mork, this organization was ignored by an expanding cohort of male administrators. Walter Daly, a Harvard alum and administrator specifically in charge of undergraduate employment, coordinated with other male placement officers at MIT, Boston University, and Massachusetts Agricultural College to form the Associated College Employment Officers in 1926.Footnote 59 When a female colleague inquired about the relationship between this organization and the NAAS, Daly admitted he had no knowledge of the prior association and, to avoid confusion, quickly changed the name of his organization to the Eastern College Personnel Officers (ECPO).Footnote 60 Several years later, these aspiring male professionals, all Harvard alumni, were responsible for reorganizing the Harvard placement office and transferring Mork's nearly one thousand employer contacts, developed over more than twenty years, to her new male superiors.Footnote 61
ECPO became an important institutional site for networking between colleges and employers. Although representatives from women's colleges attended, the focus was overwhelmingly on placing male college graduates into business.Footnote 62 Over time, representation at ECPO expanded geographically, and placement officers and employment managers formed close professional and personal ties.Footnote 63 When the employment manager of Ohio-based Procter & Gamble Company left his firm in September of 1940, he made sure to introduce his replacement, David Watt, to the directors of Harvard's placement office.Footnote 64 A few weeks later, Watt wrote to the assistant director, Donald Moyer, expressing how much he enjoyed meeting him at the last ECPO meeting, and how much he looked forward to getting better acquainted when he visited Cambridge.Footnote 65 These ties were further reinforced as personnel circulated between universities and firms. Paul Viets, one of the founding members of ECPO from Massachusetts Agricultural College, left in 1927 to take up a job as personnel manager of the Plymouth Cordage Company.Footnote 66 James Dwinell, who graduated from Harvard in 1902, had been an employment manager at the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company before becoming the director of Harvard's Alumni Placement Service in the reorganization of 1929.Footnote 67 Other colleges and universities saw the benefits of these services to both institutions and their alumni. In 1925, 44 percent of large universities in the United States had organized placement bureaus.Footnote 68 By the 1940s, most colleges and universities had joined one of a growing number of regional and national personnel and placement associations that vied for professional dominance.Footnote 69
Criteria for Selection and Placement
Those in charge of personnel hiring based their decisions on a combination of technical knowledge, social and cultural skills, and personal characteristics. A human capital explanation of recruitment and hiring would focus primarily on the technical skills that students possessed.Footnote 70 Specialized technical knowledge was essential for certain jobs, particularly technicians and engineers. The Walworth Company in New York called for “experienced metallurgists”; Lever Brothers in Cambridge was “eager to see promising young chemists at any time” for “general industrial chemistry work.”Footnote 71 The Harvard placement office compiled lists of students who had taken courses in sought-after forms of knowledge: physics, math, and advanced economics.Footnote 72
Technical knowledge, however, was a necessary but not sufficient condition. Social skills and cultural norms were just as important. Kendall Mills, a textile company headquartered in Boston, wanted scientists who had the “ability to get along with others”; for a new chemist, they preferred someone with an “advanced degree and industrial experience, though personality and adaptability come first.”Footnote 73 Firms also distinguished between prospective technical assistants, engineers, and researchers, and those they wanted to groom into supervisors and executives. For the latter group, cultural knowledge and social skills were essential. Employers valued extracurricular clubs and athletic teams as arenas in which students developed and demonstrated leadership qualities as well as the skill of being a team player.Footnote 74
The parallel development of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) illustrates the distinction between these two types of college graduates. MIT developed a reputation for training engineers, and the bulk of requests for technically trained men went there.Footnote 75 Compared to Harvard, a greater proportion of MIT students were lower middle class, nearly 30 percent of students were international in 1910, and there was even a small minority of female students.Footnote 76 MIT's success in engineering, as well as each institution's financial concerns, led to five different merger attempts by Harvard and MIT leaders between 1869 and 1912. However, the overwhelming majority of MIT alumni believed that a merger would destroy MIT's identity as an engineering institute as opposed to a liberal arts college. Critics of the merger, such as Francis Walker, MIT president from 1881 to 1897, contrasted the hard-working MIT student with the Harvard undergraduate, who could be seen “loafing in academic groves” and “browsing around among the varied foliage and herbage of a great university.”Footnote 77 There was some truth to this caricature. Harvard undergraduates at the turn of the twentieth century were still overwhelmingly the sons of wealthy New Englanders, and the social tone was set by “club men” who lived in “gold coast” dormitories and ate in elite social clubs.Footnote 78
These divergent reputations had an impact on their graduates' employment prospects. John Ripley Freeman, an MIT graduate who headed a successful hydraulic engineering consulting firm, supported the merger plan in 1904.Footnote 79 Freeman argued that MIT only trained the corporals of industry, while Harvard trained the captains. What MIT lacked was the cultural education that liberal arts college students received. Employers reaffirmed this distinction. In the 1920s, Howard Coonley, president of the Walworth Company, said, “We find that the man who stands best in his college training as a student very seldom is a good executive. He is often a remarkable specialist. … If I want to obtain engineers I go to an institution which specializes in training engineers of a certain type, but if I want an engineer executive I always seek a man who has had a general course of engineering training.”Footnote 80 While the MIT–Harvard merger plan ultimately failed due to a legal technicality, MIT began to expand humanities and social science requirements in ways that reflected Freeman's and Coonley's observations and a broader shift in elite engineering education.Footnote 81 MIT economist David Rich Dewey (the brother of philosopher John Dewey) was instrumental in launching Course XV in Engineering Administration in 1914 “to fit men for administrative positions.” This sequence included classes in law, history, economics, and scientific management, and became the Sloan School of Management in 1938.Footnote 82 As other engineering schools in Boston expanded, MIT graduates were groomed to enter the executive elite. A 1910 survey of MIT alumni found that 9 percent were in executive positions; by 1939, 20 percent were.Footnote 83
While a substantial minority of Harvard undergraduates pursuing business entered manufacturing, the majority went into finance, banking, distribution and marketing.Footnote 84 For these jobs, academic knowledge was important, but in a more abstract sense. In 1936, Boston investment bank Kidder, Peabody and Company, whose partners included several “Harvard men,” reached out to the Harvard placement office. “One of the principal requisites,” partner Chandler Hovey wrote, was “outstanding records scholastically, as such records indicate brains.” As Hovey explained, “We are not looking for clerks; we have plenty of those. We are looking for the type of young men who have enough imagination and intelligence to work up into responsible positions.” Brains plus “spark” was something intangible but identifiable. Hovey admitted that he himself had never attended college, but “I remember distinctly when I was at school that there were always some scholars who were head and shoulders above the others.”Footnote 85 Employers often possessed a vision of the brilliant “college man” they wanted.
In the wake of the Great Depression, the proportion of jobs in banking and finance declined, while those in manufacturing, marketing, and insurance increased.Footnote 86 In the realm of marketing and sales, appearance and an affable yet aggressive personality were the primary requirements. Through the 1930s, Robert Hosmer of the Excelsior Insurance Company continued to ask Dwinell for salesmen with a “pleasing appearance” and “good personality.”Footnote 87 Procter & Gamble sought a man for their sales department who was of the “dominant type” with an “impressive appearance.”Footnote 88 The Dennison Manufacturing Company specified in its request for salesmen: “Must be a diplomat, good sales type. No timid souls.”Footnote 89 Unmarried men were preferable, especially in sales, since salesmen were expected to travel frequently.Footnote 90
Some companies asked directly for information about religion, race, and ethnicity. Procter & Gamble desired “men of good ability and personality, not in last quarter of class, and Christians preferred.”Footnote 91 Kendall Mills requested Protestants exclusively.Footnote 92 The International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) in New York asked for photos of students and information about “what [his] father does” because the company believed “family background [was] important in estimating [a] boy's capacity and interest.”Footnote 93 Because there were so few candidates who were not Caucasian Protestants, the Harvard placement officers tended to note exceptions. In correspondence about a prospective employee with Kendall Mills, Dwinell wrote, “He is good-natured, cheerful, and does not betray too forcibly in his appearance that he is of Levantine origin.”Footnote 94 Dwinell followed up with Connecticut manufacturing company Landers, Frary & Clark: “It has, of course, occurred to me that you may not react favorably to Woodhouse's record on account of his race. I realize that it is difficult to imagine a native of India being particularly successful in working with New Englanders. I want to reassure you, however … Woodhouse is extremely attractive and has made good with all kinds of people around here.”Footnote 95 Over the next few years, Landers, Frary & Clark would continue to ask for detailed information about students' “pedigree” and would follow up about unusual names to ensure they were of the desired nationality.Footnote 96 To the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in New York looking for a statistician, Moyer reassured the personnel manager, “Although Bernstone is Jewish, he is one of the most popular men in the department.”Footnote 97 It must be highlighted that these were instances in which Harvard placement officers chose to recommend students despite their racial and religious characteristics—it is not knowable how many were passed over entirely.Footnote 98
More subtly, many descriptors that placement officers used to describe candidates were proxies for other characteristics, particularly class. Lower-class graduates were usually described as a “chap” with adjectives that connoted roughness and resilience: the son of a packing-house foreman and mechanical engineer by training was “a substantial chap”; a Catholic student recommended for production work was described as a “small but very husky sort of chap”; the son of a mining engineer recommended for production in a foundry was “a rugged, self-reliant chap who knows how to take it.”Footnote 99 Students from lower-class backgrounds typically attended public school, were the recipients of scholarships, and worked part-time during college and over summers. This personal history was made known to potential employers, likely exacerbating class disparities.Footnote 100
While the Harvard placement office promoted itself as a service to aid all students, in reality its top priority was to shape Harvard's reputation. Placement officers openly admitted, among alumni circles, that they did not help everyone who registered. Addressing the Harvard Associated Clubs in 1930, Dwinell explained that graduates could be classified into three categories. About 10 percent of each class consisted of successful men eagerly sought by employers. A much larger second group encompassed men “of capacity, but whose personalities do not so clearly reveal that capacity.” Dwinell offered an example:
“I have one man whose case concerns me very much. He is graduating from College at the age of 26, and he worked four years between the grammar and high schools. … He came to Harvard and majored in English Literature with a better than average standard, but he still speaks the language of the small town machine-shop. Harvard may have deepened his understanding of English literature, but superficially he is just what he was four years ago. In no outward respect is he a college man. He has sought four opportunities [through placement] unsuccessfully. … It is the men in this group that constitute the real placement problem. They are not the type of men the average employer has in mind when he says he wants college men.”Footnote 101
Academic achievements notwithstanding, this was a working-class student who would never be a “college man,” and the placement office was wary of recommending him. A third category of men, according to Dwinell, was made up of low-achieving students whom the placement office would simply not help, students who really “should have gone to work directly after leaving high school and never gone to college at all.” A college education had been wasted on these students, Dwinell implied. The placement office should not help them, he explained, because “the office of service is finally going to be sold, not by advertising, but by the men placed.”Footnote 102 In correspondence with employers, placement officers would often state that they did not have anyone who fit the bill. In 1936, Dwinell wrote to the Excelsior Insurance Company: “While we have one hundred or so men registered [in that geographic area], frankly there is not one of them whom I care to suggest to you.”Footnote 103 The Harvard placement office was careful to help employers find exactly who they wanted, including the right class, racial, and ethnic preferences, to improve their reputation as a source of employees.
The Credentialed Corporate Ladder
The pathways from elite universities to leading firms strengthened over time. Once alumni moved into executive positions, they often favored those from their own alma mater. Between 1896 and 1939, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company and its subsidiaries hired between one and fourteen Harvard graduates per year and became one of the largest employers of college graduates in the United States in the 1920s.Footnote 104 Henry Dennison of Dennison Manufacturing was partial to other Harvard alumni.Footnote 105 In 1930, General Agent Frank Bobst of the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance in Boston wrote to the placement office to express the company's continued interest: “In view of the fact that a number of Harvard graduates have been and are now members of the sales staff of this Agency … we will be most interested to interview others who might qualify for work of this sort.”Footnote 106
The influx of college graduates into business corporations significantly shaped the corporate occupational structure. Employers benefited from easy access to a supply of employees with their desired characteristics as well as the prestige and social networks that college graduates brought to their firms. At the same time, most graduates had very little experience in the actual operation, let alone management, of business. Large firms restructured their internal training procedures to accommodate this lack of experience. Many created distinct “tracks” and training programs for college graduates, who started at the bottom and would rotate through departments before promotion to a managerial role. At Lever Brothers, college graduates started as “messengers” before advancing to administrative positions.Footnote 107 In the early 1930s, Procter & Gamble developed a yearlong salesmanship training course for future division managers as well as a preforemanship training course that groomed collegians into factory superintendents.Footnote 108 Because firms typically hired college graduates in order to promote them to management, these graduates quickly surpassed less-educated employees into executive positions.Footnote 109
The structure of employee training and promotion favored wealthier candidates, which helped reinforce a particular class composition of managers. Starting college graduates at the bottom continued long-standing apprenticeship practices that served to teach novices the ins-and-outs of the firm at a low cost.Footnote 110 This policy also had the effect, however, of weeding out students from lower-class backgrounds who could not afford to live in Boston on such a small income. In correspondence with Boston department store Filene's Sons Company, Moyer noted that one prospective employee “questions whether he can afford to accept employment in Boston for as little as you are prepared to offer him,” while two other candidates “are local boys and I assume are interested.”Footnote 111 Based on data gathered through vocational surveys of graduates in the 1920s and 1930s, a large proportion of Harvard graduates lived at home with parents immediately after college.Footnote 112 Boston consulting firm Lichtner Associates expected a new hire to be “able to support himself for a time,” assuming assistance from parents or savings.Footnote 113 Like a nineteenth-century apprenticeship or modern-day unpaid internship, being able to forgo a livable income was a fee of entry into the most desirable firms.
This structure of employee promotion was also a way to build loyalty to the firm. Employers pitched a low starting salary as a meritocratic means of proving oneself as a worthy employee. The Employers Group, an insurance company, explained, “We are willing to start them in on what we call a livable wage and from there on it's up to the man himself.”Footnote 114 Waldo Adler, a Harvard alum and Philadelphia-based real estate executive, preferred “entirely green” graduates to hire as salesmen, who would serve a six- to seven-year apprenticeship on a commission basis before earning a salary.Footnote 115 Adler was one of many employers who specified that they did not want graduates who had previously worked for competitors.Footnote 116 Some firms, like Procter & Gamble, developed summer internship programs for college juniors and seniors as a way to recruit loyal employees fresh from college.Footnote 117 In these ways, college graduates became dependable, devoted employees with in corporate management.
Collegian Corporate Culture in Their Own Words
In the upper echelons of the business world, alumni were increasingly surrounded by other college graduates. An actuarial clerk for the State Mutual Life Assurance Company in Worcester, Massachusetts, described, “To give you an idea of my associates, at the neighboring desk is a Yale grad—behind me is a New Hampshire man with a year's graduate work in Math at Brown; my ‘boss' is a Yale man, and the Actuary himself is a University of Toronto graduate.”Footnote 118 One Harvard graduate began to work as a messenger at Lever Brothers with six colleagues from his Harvard class.Footnote 119 Alums enjoyed working with fellow collegians and described their college associates as “gentlemen,” “high grade” men who made work more “pleasant” and “attractive.”Footnote 120 If not living at home, college graduates often boarded and socialized together.Footnote 121 These associations spilled over into their professional life, especially investment and marketing jobs, in which lunching or playing golf with clients was their day-to-day work.Footnote 122
Alumni also took to heart the superiority of college-educated men. These attitudes are expressed most clearly in their descriptions of non-college-educated associates. One Harvard alum working among “high school graduates” in the classified ad department of a Cleveland newspaper reflected, “For the most part a fine lot, but many of them little children as far as ideas and social development is [sic] concerned.”Footnote 123 Another accountant for the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company surrounded by “clerks drawn from the lower middle class” claimed that they were all “of indifferent intelligence and small education.”Footnote 124 These attitudes were both racialized and gendered. One insurance agent of the class of 1920 dealt with “Petty Jewish types principally. Unprepossessing, uninteresting and for the most part unintelligent.”Footnote 125 Many college graduates had women working for them as secretaries and stenographers, commonly referred to as “girls,” and some male collegians expressed annoyance with the “petty office politics” of female employees.Footnote 126 As college graduates often experienced rapid promotion, a common way to refer to less-educated associates was to suggest their limited promotion prospects. “My associates were mostly high school or less products without the desire to accomplish anything more advanced than what they were doing,” stated one New York Daily News clerk. Another AT&T accounting clerk wrote, “Only a few were college grads. … Majority were of the type that would never receive much advancement.”Footnote 127 Furthermore, the failure of a college graduate to receive rapid promotion was a major blow to his own self-worth as a collegian. One Harvard graduate working in a clerical job at Dennison Manufacturing that “any elementary high school pupil could do,” wrote, “I feel quite useless, and it is a ‘deflating’ thought to think that if I left the company I would not be missed one iota.”Footnote 128 Some college graduates especially resented having superiors that subverted the racial and gender hierarchy. A sales employee of Godfrey L. Cabot Inc., a Boston-headquartered chemical company, wrote, “The person immediately over me was a Jewess who had been working there five years. She was most ignorant and domineering.”Footnote 129 As male college graduates increasingly filled the higher ranks of management, they internalized an occupational ladder that conflated job performance and merit with credentials, racial, and gendered characteristics.
University Degree and the Criteria of Merit
The rising number of college graduates in business in turn provoked changes in the institutional ecology of business-training institutions. Harvard University leaders supported a professional school of business open exclusively to college graduates. If business were to be put on a scientific basis and guided by the ethical ideal of service, many educators and businessmen believed, it could become, in the words of Henry Dennison, the “newest and possibly the greatest profession.”Footnote 130 In 1908, the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration (today's Harvard Business School, HBS) opened offering a two-year master's in business administration, with courses including accounting, commercial contracts, banking, and finance.Footnote 131 By 1929, 40 percent of each graduating HBS class entered positions in banking and finance, the majority as investment bankers.Footnote 132 The HBS placement office, founded in 1923, was even more selective than the college in making recommendations, and from day one only aided highly qualified students.Footnote 133 Even with this exclusive policy, by the mid-1920s the HBS placement office was placing the majority of graduates pursuing employment.Footnote 134 The HBS placement officers also conducted extensive visiting tours in the 1930s to promote their alumni among leading businessmen across the country, turning the MBA into a coveted credential by 1930.Footnote 135
While Harvard University continued to dominate the niche of liberal arts and graduate degrees, other Boston colleges and universities began to offer tailored bachelor's degrees in business administration, finance, or commercial science. As mentioned, the YMCA won degree-granting power for its male-only evening School of Commerce and Finance in 1911, which quickly became one of the largest collegiate business schools in the country, primarily training certified public accountants.Footnote 136 Boston University (BU), a co-ed university, founded an evening (and subsequently daytime) College of Business Administration in 1913, which soon outpaced all of its other schools in enrollment.Footnote 137 Boston College (BC), a Catholic institution, opened a mens-only School of Business Administration in 1938.Footnote 138 Across the country, programs of “higher commercial education” multiplied and were praised by university presidents.Footnote 139 Compared to a traditional BA or BS degree, these degrees were typically one or two years long, less expensive, and they often offered flexible evening hours. These features made them accessible to working adults—like proprietary commercial schools, but with a culminating college degree. Students increasingly chose the more prestigious option. Many proprietary commercial schools, newly squeezed by degree-granting business programs, were forced to close; others sought to remake themselves as collegiate institutions.Footnote 140
The race to open new collegiate degree-granting programs can also be understood as a response to the feminization of white-collar work and the surge of female students in proprietary schools, public high schools, and women's colleges. A broad swath of the educational and economic leadership of Boston saw advanced business education as a way to channel men into positions above “dead-end” feminized clerical jobs. The BU College of Business Administration originated out of a concern among male alumni that BU's co-ed liberal arts college was developing a reputation as a “girl's college,” and that collegiate-grade business training would help retilt the gender balance toward men.Footnote 141 The business school at BC explicitly aimed to train “upright and God-fearing … Christian gentlemen” for “the various fields of business activity.”Footnote 142 Often driven by the demands of their alums, institutions like BU and BC used their degree-granting authority to establish a higher-level niche in a crowded landscape of business-training institutions and to launch their preferred male graduates into the upper levels of business employment.
In practice, women attained college degrees in increasing numbers, outpacing each new credentialed hurdle. The meaning of a woman's credential in the labor market, however, was distinct from that of her male counterparts and powerfully illustrates the illusion of meritocratic promotion that male collegians assumed. The philanthropic Women's Education and Industrial Union (WEIU) in Boston founded the earliest women's employment bureau in 1878 and narrowed its focus to placing women college graduates in 1909. In 1910, the bureau secured a new director, Laura Drake Gill, who was also the president of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae representing women college graduates across the country.Footnote 143 Through this national network, the WEIU bureau placed college women in positions “other than teaching,” primarily as stenographers and secretaries, and developed extensive connections to firms more than a decade before their male college counterparts achieved the same level of coordination.Footnote 144 However, while the WEIU bureau aspired to promote new professions for women, the employment paths for female graduates were restricted. While the rare female college graduate became a proprietor herself, in large firms women tended to reach the position of secretary or mid-level manager (typically managing women) while remaining subordinate to male executives.Footnote 145 Many women were content with their positions, which offered higher pay and better working conditions than alternatives open to them. However, according to one 1926 national survey, 20 percent of secretaries hoped to use their positions as an “entering wedge” into higher managerial or professional positions, and some complained about the limits of advancement and salary.Footnote 146 Specialized college degree programs for women—such as Secretarial Studies at Simmons College launched in 1902 or BU's School of Secretarial Science founded in 1919—aspired to elevate, but in practice “demarcated,” the positions of secretaries, stenographers, and office and department store managers as women's professions.Footnote 147 Credentials alone could not open all doors, and placement services could only help certain populations within the constraints set by the leaders of the new corporate economy.
Conclusion
By 1940, colleges and universities had forged new pathways for their graduates into the corporate world. The expansion of proprietary schools and the influx of women and immigrant populations into business provoked a reaction among economic and educational elites seeking to maintain their own prestige and power. Through alumni-based placement networks, elite institutions like Harvard cultivated ties to leading employers and shaped the reputation of their own graduates. This reputation was based not only on knowledge and skill but the gendered, racial, ethnic, and class traits of those graduates they endorsed. Based on the success of the selected alumni they promoted, elite universities helped set the standards of prestige to which other students, and institutions, aspired. Other degree-granting colleges and universities developed their own business programs and placement services to establish their own niche as high as possible within a competitive landscape.
Many promoters of higher education in the twentieth century believed that a college degree would provide a fail-safe ticket into lucrative employment. The dramatic growth of proprietary commercial schools, public high schools, and degree-granting institutions in cities like Boston indeed helped many enter an expanding field of white-collar employment. Business leaders and the most well-connected universities, however—increasingly linked on a national scale—responded by mutually strengthening their control of corporate leadership positions. Although the need for technical knowledge sometimes overcame employer prejudices, the expansion of exclusive degrees in the early twentieth century helped cloak gender, racial, and class-based hierarchies under the guise of merit. Through the creation of a tier of corporate managers by 1940, universities thus played a central role in legitimating a steep social hierarchy. The mid-twentieth century “golden era” of federal education funding, the gains of industrial labor unions, and the social protections of an expansive welfare state mitigated some of the effects of this new, credential-based form of social inequality. But as these rights and resources began to be eroded in the 1970s, the partnership of the academic and economic 1 percent was invigorated, and educational credentials became increasingly salient as a means of structuring social opportunity.Footnote 148
The long history of the coevolution of elite universities and corporate capitalism should help us to think critically about the making, and remaking, of an economic elite. As the history of placement services demonstrates, universities did not merely reflect the power of the corporate world but, through their administrators and alumni, were active agents in forging the composition and professional culture of this corporate class. As graduates entered, rose, and recruited like-minded graduates into the business world, they replicated the forms of technical, social, and cultural knowledge as well as the gendered, racial, and demographic traits cultivated at their own institutions. A close historical reconstruction of the nexus of elite university placement and American business elites allows us to observe the process through which placement officers, alumni, and employers together forged the criteria that defined one's value within the modern corporate economy.
