College training and the business man

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COLLEGE TRAINING AND THE BUSINESS MAN

Prefatory Note

For almost three hundred years the American college has been seeking to serve the higher interests of American life. It has been, and still is, supposed to bear a special relation of preparation for what are known as the *' learned professions." Banking, transportation, insurance represent three great labors to which men in increasing numbers and of greater power have in recent years been giving themselves. The purpose of the following pages is to present the advantage which these three vocations, which no one calls '' learned," and which the work of general administration, may receive from the college. The purpose is in a way narrow ; but I venture to hope that in trying to gain it I have succeeded in illustrating some advantages which the college may give to man as man. For, the great human worth of the college is incomparably superior to its worth in training efficient administrators.

C. F. T.

Cleveland.

Contents

PAGE

Prefatory Note v

II. In Banking 43

II In Banking

IN BANKING

The work of the banker is simple, plain, easy; the business of banking is elaborate, complex, difficult. The ordinary service which the ordinary employee of the ordinary bank renders is a service which a good graduate of a good grammar school should be able to render with ease. This service consists largely in keeping books. Its processes are arithmetical. Its duties are not difficult, and they are learned by doing. No college education is needed for doing such work.

But in its large relations banking represents the business of the world. A bank is the clearing-house of all kinds of manufacturing, commercial, financial processes and concerns. The debtor and creditor class meet in a bank. The material results of modern civilization — its foresight, wisdom, struggle, triumph — are most significantly embodied in a bank. The material reservoir, too, from which the material forces of the civilization of the future can be most effectively drawn is a bank. The intimations of impending disaster are here first felt. The methods for thwarting financial blasting and mildew, or for escaping financial tornadoes, are here elaborated ; the methods, too, for lessening the damages which these disasters may have already wrought are discussed and decided in a bank. The reciprocal relations of all forms of business, the relations of the people to the Government and of the Government to the people, the relations of social class to social class, find their microcosm in a bank. Before France and Austria go to war, their financial representatives consult the bankers; and the terms of peace are determined at least somewhat, and may be essentially dictated, by the bankers of Paris, Vienna, Berlin, or London. When Mr. Matthew Arnold wrote that he had bought some Spanish, Italian, and Turkish stocks in order to keep his interest in modern history alive, he could have been assured that the same essential and comprehensive result might have been secured by his buying a few shares in a great bank.

Therefore, whether it is expedient for the young man who proposes to be a banker first to go to college depends largely upon his conception of the work which he desires to do in and through a bank. In case he is content to be a good bookkeeper, or an accurate teller, he will not find a college education of special worth to himself; in case he desires to be a banker of large relations, he will find a college education, I venture to say, of very great value.

The primary intellectual element in the value of a college education to a banker, as to most men, lies in the enlargement and enrichment of the power of thinking. A college education develops, or at least aims to develop, the power of seeing, of reasoning, of judgment, of comparison, of appreciation. The graduate is supposed to know truths, or what is more, to know truth — to know truth through knowing truths. He is able to have a comprehensive notion of his work. He sees the relation of part to part, of each part to the whole, and of the whole to each part. Its elements of strength and of weakness, its points that require emphasis and elaboration, its points that require no care, its adjustments and readjustments, its progress and regress — these and many other parts he is to consider. Financial schemes which have the substance of the " South- Sea Bubble " he is to distinguish from undertakings that are as solid as the Treasury of the United States, or the Bank of England. Such discriminations, in advance and on a priori grounds, it would seem to be easy to make: for a large gulf divides the counterfeit from the genuine, the inevitably disastrous from the assuredly triumphant. But experience both recent and remote, proves that not only the ordinary body of the American people but also that part of it which is not ordinary becomes easily and disastrously confounded in respect to financial theories and movements. The fact is that money represents one of the most difficult problems to which the reason of man ever gives itself. Trained in and through general studies, trained in and through economic subjects, the college graduate, becoming a banker, is often and distressingly mistaken ; but he would be mistaken with greater frequency and severer distress were he not a graduate.

4.8

Many bankers have written me regarding the advantages and disadvantages possessed by the college graduate in entering the business of banking in comparison with those possessed by the graduate of the high or grammar school. Among the great advantages possessed by the college graduate alluded to by many of my gracious correspondents is the comprehensive advantage of a larger intellectual training and discipline. Mr. A. B. Hepburn, vice-president of the Chase National Bank of New York, says:

" The young men who come to us later in their teens, after graduating from the high schools and grammar schools_, make excellent clerks — among the best we have. They are devoid of self -consciousness, go to the foot of the ladder unhesitatingly, are bright, keen, alert, and* become competent and efficient clerks. Some of them, of broader capacity and ambition, study their surroundings and endeavor to master the principles of the business as a whole in which they form but a cog in the wheel, and in the course of time develop into capable, efficient executive officers.

" College graduates possess no disadvantages in comparison with high school or grammar school graduates as bank clerks, except perhaps the necessity of overcoming their sense of self-importance. Like all others they go to the foot of the ladder and are compelled to work their way up through the grind. Some of them seem to feel a sense of impropriety in being put to work alongside of boys of fifteen. The later work in college is considerably removed from the active mathematical computation and the intellectual work that bank clerks as a rule are called upon to perform^ so that the college graduate requires some time to become as expert in the mathematical work imposed upon him as the graduate of the high school, whose later years of study involve the very work his business calls upon him to employ. ** These two disadvantages overcome, the advancement of the college graduate is much more rapid. He is older, has learned to concentrate his thoughts, has a better and more efficient control over his intellectual faculties, has a broader and deeper foundation, and is bound in the end to far outstrip the high school graduate of equal ability and application. I would unhesitatingly advise any young man who contemplates a banking career to graduate from college before taking up banking if his means and opportunities will admit of his so doing. At fifty years of age he will find himself much further advanced in the business world than he would have been without his college training. In the matter of contact with other men, either personally or by correspondence, a college education is invaluable. It opens opportunities to a man all through his business career, and other things being equal, his superior education would give him preference in the selection of a person for official responsibility.'*

Mr. Seymour Dexter, president of the Second National Bank of Elmira, New York, says:

" The college graduate will more quickly comprehend the specific work he is engaged in. First, how should it be done; second, its relation to other work in the bank organism. If the work bring him in contact with customers of the bank, his broader education and experience and touch with men will improve the impression which he makes upon those with whom he comes in contact. He will more fully comprehend the relation of the bank and the social organism in which it is conducted. He will more readily grasp and seek to understand the whole subject of banking, better imderstand the positions above him and the work to be done, and may be more rapidly advanced to larger responsibilities if opportunity occurs. He is not liable to become the mere machine in the discharge of his clerical duties."

An officer of the Union Savings Bank and Trust Company of Cincinnati, says:

** When I was a boy at high school, my neighbors and those who took an interest in me suggested that I be sent to college. When the matter was brought before my father, he said that if I intended to follow a professional life he would urge me to do the same, but if it was my intention to follow a business life, he would not approve of it, and this impression was general at that time. I think, perhaps, A. T. Stewart, the large merchant in New York, was more responsible for this impression than any other one man at that time. It was said of him that he claimed the more a man knew of books the less he knew of business; but, after a life experience in business, I should say by all means have the young man go through college if he intends following a business life. I believe the future business man (and the banker is made of the business man) is to come out of our colleges, but do not understand me to say that a banker can be educated in a college. What you want to find in a banker is administrative ability, and this, to my mind, is best made by experience in a successful business life, but the education that a boy would get in college would assist him in grasping such knowledge as experience would give him much quicker, than if he did not have the college education."

These extracts are examples of what many bankers have written me, and are interpretative and confirmatory of what I am trying to say, to wit, that the clerical work in a bank does not require for its doing a college education, but that the work of a banker, considered in its large relations, is vastly aided by the training which a college gives to responsive and responsible students.

One may be allowed to allude to an incise dental advantage which the college man in a bank enjoys — an advantage which is indeed incidental to a degree, but one which in many instances proves to be of great worth. I refer to the acquaintances which are formed in and through the college. These acquaintances represent the choicest part of the community. They represent the men who, twenty-five years out of college, are to be the promoters and supporters of the great financial and other movements of the time. Members of the class of 1880 of Harvard College have carried forward some of the most important undertakings of New York and Boston, of the last five years. To form and to retain such acquaintances many a banker struggles hard and long. Such acquaintances belong naturally and easily to a good college man. Of the opportunities which they fittingly open he is able to avail himself.

The disadvantages under which the graduate entering the banking business labors are chiefly three: (1) he begins his apprenticeship three or four years later; (2) he is in peril of not being wilhng to drudge; (3) he is liable to lack a certain mechanical swiftness, or dexterity, in dealing with figures. To these three points I wish to allude.

Of course the graduate begins three or four years later than the graduate of the high school. The high-school graduate enters the bank at the age of eighteen, the college graduate at the age of twenty-two. But it is to be said at once that the college man soon overtakes and soon passes the high-school man. Of course it is presumed that the two are of equal ability. Of course, too, it is to be recognized that there are men, having a college education, who have less intellectual power than high-school men not having a college education. A college does not make brains; it is supposed only to improve brains already made. But the argument is clear and sohd that, in case the college man has as great intellectual ability as the high-school man, he will soon make up for lack of experience, experience which the high-school boy has gained, and having made up for this lack, he will soon go ahead of him, and will continue going ahead of him by constantly increasing lengths. He is able to put a better-trained brain into his work. He is able to foresee and to see. He is able to do certain things without ever having learned to do them. As two of my correspondents remark;

" The college graduate ought to have a mental training that would enable him more readily to comprehend the more difficult questions liable to be presented. He ought to learn more quickly the details of the work from his habits of study. His larger experience with men and the self-dependence acquired at a large institution ought to give him more confidence in transacting business with the public. A college man has lived in a little world, has sharpened his witSj has had the stimulus of competition, has learned to use his faculties, knows something of his relative ability, and ought to outstrip the high school boy."

" The mass of bank clerks have had few advantages, they gradually and painfully acquire proficiency which would come more quickly to the man who had learned to use his brain to the best advantage. With equal capacity and industry, I should say the college man in five years would outstrip the high school boy with his three or four years' experience."

The objection is further made that the college graduate is unwilling to drudge. He feels himself, it is said, above the duty of beginning to climb at the bottom of the ladder. Of the age of twenty-two, bearing an academic degree, he is not willing to do these simple duties or hmnble tasks which the high-school boy of eighteen may delight to do. Of course there are college men of this sort. One, however, hears of them a great deal of tener than one meets them. I believe their number is vastly exaggerated. The college trains the student to do whatever he is called to do. The record of the college men who entered the army, in both the great civil war and the Spanish, proves not only that no men were more brave on the firing line, but also that no men were more faithful in doing the drudgeries of camp duties than the college men. If it is fitting for the graduate to sweep the bank, he will sweep it, and sweep it better and quicker than the ordinary man. I know a former Harvard student of high rank who through ill health has become a hedger and a ditcher. He tells me he can dig ditches far better by reason of his college training. I know of a Yale graduate who is working as a section-hand on the Pennsylvania Railroad. But he will not work there long. The charge so often made against the college man that he is not willing to drudge is essentially a false one. The college man is willing to do whatever is his duty.

The third disadvantage under which the college graduate labors is the inability to attend to certain arithmetical or semimechanical processes with the dexterit}^ of the high-school boy. Mr. L. V. F. Randolph, president of the Atlantic Trust Company of New York, and who has for fifty years been engaged in banking, writes, saying :

** I have noticed that the average high school boy is able to spell and write about as well as the college graduate; that his figures are as plain, and that his accuracy of computation is as satisfactory. It may almost be said to hold good that, within certain limits, the younger a boy applies himself to figures the better he does with them; and I have found youngsters from the high school quite as apt at the composition of business letters as college graduates. This might not hold good as a rule; but I fear that there are so many cases in which no positive advance in such knowledge as is useful in banking is made at college, that the general argument would be in favor of taking the apprentice in banking at an earlier age, and giving up the college course."

5 57

This disadvantage the college graduate does labor under. He may, of course, overcome it, at least somewhat. But one may as well confess that the college does not aim at making good computers.

The worth, therefore, of a college education to most men, who propose to become bankers of large relations, seems to be evident, provided that conditions be fairly favorable. Among these conditions is one, which several of my correspondents name, of peculiar significance — the cost of an education should not be made too great. Many families give themselves distress through excessive economies in order to educate a son. The son who is willing to accept of an education under such conditions proves himself to be unworthy of an education. He should work his way largely or entirely through college. The boy who lets his mother pay for his cigars by taking in washing, or even the boy who lets his mother pay his fees for instruction by taking in washing, does not hold out promise of becoming a useful banker or a good laundrjrman himself. The Treasurer of the United States writes me, saying :

" I have seen a father scrimped in his comforts, a mother and sisters toiling early and late to the peril of their healthy to send a favorite son and brother to college, with the result of pampering him and weakening his self-reliance and sturdiness."

Unless the boy, the son of a family of great poverty, can go through college without laying a burden on the family, he had usually better not go. But thankfully be it said, he can go through without laying this burden, in case he be worthy of an education.

This discussion I wish to close by making long extracts from two letters written by two conspicuous men: one the president of the First National Bank of Chicago, and the other by the Treasurer of the United States. Mr. Jas. B. Forgan, of Chicago, says:

** In answer to your first question, * What are (a) the advantages, (b) the disadvantages, possessed by a college graduate in entering the banking business, over those possessed by a graduate of the high school or grammar school ? ' my answer would be that I do not know of any advantages that the college graduate would have over the high school graduate, nor do I know of any disadvantages, except that he would be starting in his business career later in life and would have to do the drudgery of an office-boy after he had acquired an education that might lead him to consider himself above work of this kind. 1 am not a college graduate myself and can not therefore say what effect a college education might have had on my business career. I had a good high school education, which qualified me for entering college had I desired to do so. I have never felt that my education has been deficient for anything required of me in my business career. My experience with those who have come into the bank under me after having had a college education leads me to believe that they learned nothing that was of any special benefit to them in their business career from their college course. ... I think that the elementary education obtained in the primary and high schools of this country is deficient in grounding the pupils in writing, arithmetic, grammar, spelling, and composition. I think the colleges, if they were to give special attention to it, might in a two years' course give a young man an education after he has graduated from the high school along lines that would be of special benefit to him in a business career, but so far as I know none of them have yet made this departure from the beaten track of classical education. . . .

" A man has ample time and opportunity in connection with his business career to develop his mind along educational lines such as suit his fancy and such as are not absolutely necicssary in his business, so that if his career in life is to be that of a business man, he had better get to work as soon as he has got the groundwork of an education that will enable him to do so^ and develop his mind by study along lines of literature, art, or the classics during liis leisure hours as a pastime."

** You present the man as already decided to enter the banking service, and ask what advantage for such an occupation a college training will confer upon him, and what disadvantages he will suffer in consequence of it. The delay in entering upon his chosen vocation, and in earning a salary, is in my opinion the chief factor on the negative side; but there is also a tendency on the part of college-bred youths to shirk the drudgery of the details essential to the discipline of the thorough banker. These are real disadvantages.

" They seem to me more than counterbalanced by the broadening influences of college studies and the mental culture which rightly used develops powers of analysis, investigation, and judgment. The college graduate who will not do the work at hand, will be worth little; the conceit which may set him above the details of his trade is personal and not chargeable to his education. He must know that his classmate who went into the bank when he started to college is three or four years ahead of him in the office routine; he ought to be even more in advance in power of thought and knowledge of principles and grasp of the forces which control individuals and society. The youth who goes to the bank from the high school will the sooner be eligible to become a teller; he who brings to the bank the discipline and knowledge and culture of a college ought the sooner to be fitted to become chief of a division, and cashier, and general manager.

" But the personal equation can not be neglected. Whatever their education and training, some men can never rise above the counters and the journals and the ledgers, while others will master the larger tasks of administration and credit, of exchange and currency, of loans and investments.

** With the limitations thus hinted at, a friend may well advise a boy of eighteen, of intellectual habits, of apparently efficient administrative abilities, to go to college from a high school, rather than to enter the banking business at once.

" Yet we must recognize the conspicuous fact that very many of the bankers most successful, certainly in the routine of their profession, are not college graduates. Nevertheless, although generals have been developed without the benefits of military schools, all nations act on the theory that education, broad and generous, is the surest condition of the highest usefulness in the most trying fields. The best banker, measured by the noblest standard, will be the man who with the amplest capacities has them best disciplined, and fostered by varied culture, and who can thus look through and all around the most difficult problems."

The question which has heen discussed has had relation to the college graduate becoming a banker. It has no relation to the larger question of his relations as a citizen. It has no relation to the range of his own enjoyments or to the development of his own personal character. Those personal and larger relations are, of course, most significant and essential. In these respects, I suppose, no one can question for a moment that the college, whether it does or does not aid a man in making a living through banking, does aid him in making a large life for himself and for the community.

Ill

IN TRANSPORTATION

IN TRANSPORTATION

I SUPPOSE that in all the current discussion regarding the function of the college no one questions but that the college education does aid one in being or becoming a gentleman. I suppose, also, that usually it is granted that a college education does aid one in being or becoming an efficient member of society. The exceptions to these two principles are so infrequent that one may eliminate them from the discussion regarding the worth of the college. But the general advantages which are supposed to accrue through a college education do not touch, in the view of certain good and wise persons, the fundamental question of the advantages or disadvantages possessed by the college graduate who enters business as a life career. Touching the question of the worth or the worthlessness of a college course as a preparation for business, no more vital method of discussion can be arrived at than one which shall make an appeal to the question of railroad service. For the railroad service is the largest field of the employment of labor, and also it represents and unites several diverse kinds of labor, as financial, executive, legal, and mechanical. It is not to be denied that there are disadvantages placed upon those who enter the railroad service after the completion of a college course. One of these disadvantages arises from the environment which the college is supposed to represent. The college represents to most men an atmosphere of leisure, of wealth, and frequently of the extravagant, unwise use of wealth. These disadvantages, of course, touch those entering any form of service as well as those entering the railroad. The general manager of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway Company says:

** Unfortunately a majority of the young men who pass through college are financially able to live on a scale which they can not hope to do in railroad service and are apt to contract expensive habits, and few of them are willing thereafter to begin railroad work at the very bottom, or if they do^ find the work too irksome and do not persevere therein. This, in my judgment, is the principal reason why so many prominent railway officials come from boys of moderate education and particularly from boys who begin the work while very young."

The more obvious disadvantage springs from the time, later by four years, at which one is able to begin the railroad service. These disadvantages are direct, positive, and plain as the alphabet.

" If he desires to enter railroad work, and is eighteen years of age^ he won't have time to go to college if he desires and expects to reach the top before he dies. Consider that it takes an average of over thirty years' actual service to make a railroad president, which, of course, is considered the top of the ladder, so no time is to be wasted if the top is to be attained."

Thus writes the general manager of the Boston & Albany Railroad. The president of the Ann Arbor Railroad says :

** The college graduate is at a disadvantage compared with the graduate of the high school and the grammar school for this reason^ that he has usually spent from three to five years of his life at college and consequently is that much older and has less opportunity of improving himself in the branches that would fit him for railroading or any other commercial business/'

The president and general manager of another road says :

** Should the high school graduate, however, enter the service directly after graduation he would have at least four years' advantage in practical experience at the time the college graduate would enter the service, and in my judgment the college graduate would not be equal to the high school graduate until he had at least five years* practical experience."

The disadvantages arising from the later time of entering the railroad service is at once to be recognized. Apparently the man who enters the railroad service requires five years to catch up with the high-school graduate who entered the same service four years before. When the high-school graduate has been working on the railroad nine years and the college graduate five they would be relatively at the same point of attainment, provided that they were of equal ability, and were possessed of equal opportunities.

A third disadvantage one should not pass over, and this lies in that condition of human nature which is inclined to depreciate advantages richer than those which oneself enjoys. Prejudice does exist still among many railroad people against the college graduate. Lessening of prejudice is going on, but it is not yet wholly ehminated. Uneducated, surly officers and fellow workmen are not disinclined to make the condition of the college graduate harder than it ought to be made. This interpretation I get not, of course, out of my own experience, but I am simply repeating the testimony of railroad men themselves.