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The Uses of Talent
By Dael Wolfle PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1971 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-08603-3
CHAPTER 1
The Ecology of Specialization
Specialization develops in cities. Adam Smith pointed out long ago that the clumping together of people permitted substantial division of labor and gave rise to occupational and professional specialization. Complex patterns of culture are found in agrarian societies, but the number of different occupational roles is limited. Specialization is a characteristic of complex societies. It grows as ,cities grow, and it continues to increase as a society moves along the road of technological advancement and economic development.
In the United States, differentiation continues. The Bureau of the Census periodically increases the number of categories used in classifying professional and technical occupations. Several years ago the Bureau announced that the occupational classifications used in 1960 will no longer suffice and that finer breakdowns will be used in the 1970 census.
From Herodotus to Adam Smith to the Bureau of the Census there is evidence for what can be called the first principle of occupational specialization: as a society advances economically and culturally, the number of occupational specialties increases. As the number of specialists grows, the total range of work to be performed also increases, and this is indeed a reason for specialization. But as the number of specialties increases, each one claims a smaller segment of the total range of work to be performed. In medicine, general practitioners have largely given way to pediatricians, psychiatrists, thoracic surgeons, and other specialists. A church that used to have one minister now has several, including a minister for youth and a minister for music. Instead of physicists we have atomic physicists, solid-state physicists, nuclear physicists, and still others. And in psychology there are clinical, counseling, social, experimental, comparative, and other kinds of psychologists.
The various occupational specialties depend upon each other and influence each other. Lawyers and ministers and engineers, bankers and salesmen and school teachers, and people in all the rest of the professional and specialized occupations interact in an intricate web of overlapping relationships. They aid and support and supplement each other. Sometimes they compete. Some specialized groups exist solely to serve other specialized groups. There is a constant flow of information among them, and various external controls and feedback mechanisms tend, although often imperfectly, to keep their numbers in reasonable balance with each other and with the needs of society.
A thumbnail sketch of the state of specialization in the United States today would include the following points. The number of professional and specialized fields is large and is still growing. As the number of identifiable specialties increases, the portion of the whole spectrum of socially useful work claimed by each specialty grows narrower. As knowledge increases, so do specialization and the time required to become a fully accredited specialist. As knowledge increases and is applied to the production of goods and services, wealth increases, as does the demand for persons of high ability and advanced education. This is where the United States is now, as far along the road of increasing specialization as any nation in the world, and farther than most.
Although this is where we are now, the description is incomplete. It would have been sufficient until a few years ago, but now it is necessary to warn that major changes are occurring in several of the forces and institutions that determine how we educate and employ the ablest members of society.
Major Factors in the Development and Utilization of Talent
If "system" had not come to be identified with what many thoughtful persons find objectionable in the way the affairs of the United States are managed, and if we were more systematic in the means we use to identify talented persons and to develop and utilize their abilities, it would be appropriate to speak of the "Talent Development and Utilization System of the United States." But if there is such a system, it is not very systematic, and if it were, the objections to it would be even stronger than they are now.
The fact is that we have no centrally planned and systematically controlled system. What we have is a number of institutions and processes that together result in preparing people for specialized fields of work and in making use of their knowledge and abilities. AU of these institutions and processes are familiar, but it is not usual to treat them together, because their analysis has traditionally been divided among several different disciplines. They can be grouped under four headings.
Educational Institutions. Here are included all schools, from kindergarten through professional and graduate schools and even postdoctoral and mid-career educational programs. Not only the institutions themselves, but also the educational processes and their outcomes, have been studied chiefly by psychologists and educators. In the last decade, there has also been a vigorous invasion of this area by economists interested in the economics of education.
The Employment Sector. All of the jobs we generate to employ the talents and reward the accomplishments of men and women of ability are included here. These jobs have been of principal interest to labor-market economists, management specialists, and sociologists.
Individual Choices. This sector includes the factors that determine how individuals use the educational and occupational opportunities open to them. The decisions of individuals about their own education and careers, and the factors that help to determine those decisions, have been studied primarily by sociologists, demographers, and psychologists.
Formulation of Policy. Here are the decision-making processes that influence or control educational and occupational opportunities and that are intended to influence educational and occupational choices. The study of these governmental and policy factors falls chiefly within the realm of the political scientists.
Political scientists, educators, psychologists, sociologists, management specialists, demographers, and economists all have an interest in these institutions and processes, but no discipline claims responsibility for all the problems involved, and there has been no real effort to integrate all of the parts into a conceptual whole. The principal parts are all known, however, and it is possible to fit them together into a scheme or model that shows the major components and relationships.
Figure 1 presents, in bare outline, the principal elements of this model. The left-hand portion represents the whole range of formal educational institutions, from kindergarten on up. Education used to be almost exclusively the province of schools and colleges. With advances in knowledge, increasing specialization, and the faster obsolescence of what one learns in college, more and more of the responsibility for education is shifting to the postcollege years. The postdoctoral fellow has become a familiar figure on the university campus. Refresher courses and opportunities to spend time in advanced study during mid-career years are increasingly recognized to be essential to the full development and maintenance of human talent. In fact, the education and utilization of high talent has become a life-long process and is decreasingly one that can be divided into two distinct phases. One evidence is the large amount of money industry now spends on training programs for its professional and executive personnel. The size of this sum is quite uncertain, for there is no central collection of information on the matter, but estimates run from, say, $4 or $5 billion a year upwards.
The Training of Talent
Although education and utilization overlap and sometimes alternate in time, it is appropriate to separate the period of formal education from the period of utilization, because the two are guided and controlled by different policy-making machinery and because students and professional workers think of themselves as being in different stages of their careers.
After varying amounts of education, streams of students leave the educational stage and flow into professional and specialized fields of work. For some professions, college graduation is the typical time for making this change, while in other fields a graduate or professional degree is the customary prerequisite. In no profession, however, is there a single, fixed level of education which is attained by all new entrants. The minimum entering level may be rigidly established, as it is in medicine, but the maximum entering level is not. In all professional and specialized fields there is a range of educational preparation that qualifies a new entrant for admission.
In the future, students of varying quality, and after varying numbers of years of study, will leave the university to begin their postcollege careers. But in some ways the universities and colleges will operate and function somewhat differently in the years ahead than they have in recent decades. This is abundantly clear from the pressures on higher education and from the number of current efforts to improve it, or perhaps only to change it.
One problem is money. Universities and colleges are in deep financial trouble. So, for that matter, is the whole educational system, from kindergarten to graduate school. The voters of many communities have refused to authorize bond issues for new school construction or have refused to raise tax limits to allow states and cities to increase their educational budgets. State legislatures have reduced by many millions of dollars the requests submitted on behalf of state universities and colleges. Federal appropriations for education and especially for science seem to have a harder and harder time getting through Congress and the President's office.
There is reason for this balkiness on the part of citizens and legislators. The costs of education have been growing more rapidly than the population, more rapidly than the Gross National Product, more rapidly than inflation, and too rapidly to continue. In the decade of the 1960's, the population of the United States increased by 14 percent. During that same decade, elementary school enrollment also increased by 14 percent, but high school enrollment went up 55 percent, and college and university enrollment doubled. The costs of education climbed even more rapidly. In a decade in which college and university enrollment grew by 104 percent, expenditures for higher education rose by 186 percent, and state legislatures increased by 250 percent the tax funds appropriated for higher education. All told, our colleges and universities now cost more than twenty billion dollars a year, and this amount represents twice as large a fraction of the Gross National Product as was spent on higher education from the much smaller GNP of ten years ago.
In the United States, as well as in a number of other countries, the percentage of the Gross National Product that is devoted to higher education has reached a level that looks to many legislators and government officials to be about as high as can be justified. We are a wealthy nation, and we can expect educational budgets to continue to increase. Nevertheless, we must expect a financial pinch, particularly in higher education. That is where the cost per student is greatest and where campus turmoil is most likely to lead to punitive responses from the state capitals or from Washington. The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education thinks that the higher-education budget should go up to $41 billion by 1976-77. A great many legislators and taxpayers are likely to consider that too much. Universities will surely be squeezed between pressures to admit more students and offer them expensive new programs and services and pressures to keep costs from getting out of bounds.
Universities are also in trouble over the charge that some of their effort is misdirected. There is, for example, a growing conviction on the part of many people that too often the goals of the specialist conflict with the goals of society, and that where such conflict exists, the goals of society must prevail. Those who hold this view are fed up with the policy of "business as usual," in a university as much as in an automobile factory. They assert that educational programs, as well as governmental and industrial programs, must be more deliberately and consciously planned in terms of the long-range welfare of society as a whole.
One manifestation of this attitude is the rebellion against the military-industrial complex, or the research-oriented university, or the alleged domination of man by his technological achievements. Another exemplification is the expressed wish for better integration of the work of different specialties. Thus, stronger interdisciplinary linkages are called for, as are social engineers, family physicians, and other generalists who can direct and integrate the work of a variety of more specialized specialists.
In their more extreme forms, the accusations against the university would destroy some of its basic purposes. Colleges and universities must satisfy the diverse wishes of students, some of whom come to college for strictly vocational purposes, some of whom come with other educational aspirations, and some of whom come with still different ideas of how they want to spend their college years. At the same time, colleges and universities are expected to educate approximately the right numbers of specialists to serve the needs of society. If one took seriously the claim that universities should cease preparing men and women for professional and specialized roles in society, it would immediately become necessary to create new institutions to educate the doctors, lawyers, scientists, diplomats, engineers, scholars, and other specialists and leaders that society needs.
How much American colleges and universities today emphasize the education of young people as they want to be educated and how much they emphasize the training of people to take places in the established order of commerce, industry, government, and higher education is a subject of much contemporary argument. Universities are sometimes accused of not having the interests of the students at heart, but of serving instead as a tool of the established order, functioning to produce new cogs for the machinery of society. In his valedictory address at Princeton in June 1969, Michael Bernstein expressed this charge in saying, "What we resent is feeling that we are being educated only to fulfill some predetermined role in society."
Granted that the universities must serve both the wishes of students and the needs of society — that they must prepare students for the kinds of jobs that are expected to exist and must educate them for whatever their personal objectives may be — it is important to remember that the size of the whole higher educational effort is determined primarily by student demand and not by national planning, and that the relative emphasis on different subjects and courses is also determined primarily by student demand. In this respect the United States differs significantly from many other countries. Elsewhere it is not uncommon for official planning bodies to forecast the need for engineers (to take that profession as an example) and then to provide the number of places in engineering schools that will produce the required number of graduates. In the United States, we operate our higher educational institutions primarily on the basis of meeting student demands rather than meeting the requirements of national plans and forecasts.
This characteristic of American educational policy not only affects students and universities but also determines the nature of the linkage between education and work and influences the ways in which graduates are later employed and the ease and frequency with which they change employment.
Jobs To Utilize Trained Talent
The second major part of the model consists of all the jobs that are generated to utilize educated men and women. The professional and specialized working force is divided into a large number of more or less distinct but clearly overlapping categories and subcategories. All exhibit continuing inward and outward flows of several kinds. Beginners flow into each field after varying amounts of educational preparation. Older workers leave because of retirement, death, or illness. Some who leave return later. Moreover, workers switch from one field of specialization to another as their interests change or as they see better opportunities in new fields of work.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Uses of Talent by Dael Wolfle. Copyright © 1971 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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