The Student's Future Plans
IN TIME of war the high-school student's future is determined more than ever by forces beyond his control. It is perhaps quite natural that many guidance counselors should, as a result, minimize the importance of occupational counseling and orientation. Undoubtedly, many young men will radically change their original vocational goals as a result of their experience in the armed forces. It is also true that the specialized training many of them will receive in the Army or Navy will make them qualified for peacetime fields for which they would hardly have been eligible as a result of their secondary-school education. The excellent work the services are doing in the classification of personnel is in itself occupational orientation of the highest order. There are, however, many vocational fields -which are not represented in the armed services, fields which many of the demobilized men will have to enter in order to restore our normal peacetime economy, fields for which their aptitudes and interests make them best fitted. Some of the most difficult guidance problems of the postwar period will center around these distributive functions of guidance. Fortunately, many students now are aware that they will have to face these problems, as evidence which is to be presented here will show. It is to be hoped that in the necessary and immediate job of training and orienting high-school boys for war service, counselors themselves will not completely lose sight of the objectives which at the moment are long-term and distant, but which will become most immediate when peace comes. In order to appraise more adequately the problems of vocational orientation faced by wartime college Freshmen, a careful survey was made in September, I942, of the effect of the war on the plans and goals of some 200 Tufts College men students starting their first year in the School of Liberal Arts. The results proved quite interesting and suggested that these students were showing more foresight than many of their elders who were supposed to be offering them guidance and counsel. The results also brought to light aspects of the general problem which had escaped the attention of the students' counselors. For example, 94 per cent of the students said that they were retaining their original occupational objectives, with the implication that their inten-