Page:Engineering as a vocation (IA cu31924004245605).pdf/105

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ENGINEERING AS A VOCATION
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and works with well-educated men, because the average young educated man has been advised by his instructors to work for low pay during the first years after college "to gain experience." Thus these chaps give rather more for the money than men not so well trained. When a man has been selected for a place because he has exhibited superior qualifications he naturally expects a regular increase in salary, year after year, even if small. When, as so often happens, he finds he has been put into a position where there is no hope of advancement and little hope for better pay he becomes discontented. The discontented ones are marked for discharge and when the next annual crop of graduates is harvested, a spellbinder from the corporation goes to the school and leads the entire class to the slaughter house, the dean rubbing his hands gleefully and taking never a thought in after years for the poor, misguided victims, who might have been spared if he had carefully investigated in advance the positions offered and had acted like a father to his boys. The process is just one little remove more cruel than the merciless processes of nature, as set forth in the works of Dr. Darwin. Out of it a few men do succeed, but the waste of effort is needless and the waste of money represented by the sacrifices of the parents of the slaughtered boys is criminal.

Some students enter American schools with so poor an idea of what engineering involves, and