Entrance to the Chooseen Vocation

It is one thing to choose a vocation, another to find a place in it. In the United States the labor union is becoming a powerful force to reckon with in industry. This complicates the problems of economic adjustment for many rural youth who migrate to cities and who are in many cases antilabor in philosophy.

Much of vocational training, even in the urban school and practically all of what little exists in rural schools, ignores this important influence of economic adjustment in contemporary life.

The whole vocational guidance and counseling movement has, indeed, now reached a point where its future seems relatively sterile and unproductive unless it will work deliberately with, in, and through the labor unions to raise the whole level of the vital vocational adjustment process to a democratic, functionally integrated plane--a plane that pulls together guidance, placement, acceptable terms of work, and strong, autonomous worker groups.

Forced delay in entering life work is prominent periodically in both urban and rural society, because of limited work opportunities. Often there is a period of waiting between school and employment, there being more or less blind stumbling about of many young people who are not fitted to enter the occupational world or who can find no appropriate opening. Many maladjustments are inherent in this situation. Those who are thwarted occupationally are likely to be thwarted in marriage, because marriage, as well as social status, group association, and general happiness, is very much conditioned by economic factors.

It may be stated as axiomatic that many occupations are available only to those who have the higher levels of education. It undoubtedly is true that within many occupations the amount of education a youth possesses determines his advancement. It is very likely that the person with less than an eighth-grade education will have to seek work either in the poorly paid ranks of farm labor and unskilled labor or in domestic service. It is just as obvious that college training or more is important to entering and succeeding in any kind of professional career. The school has become one of the main social elevators by which socioeconomic status is improved.