SCHOOLS FOR EXECUTIVES: How Helpful Is Industry's New Fad?

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TIME was when a new rug on the floor or a bigger office was the infallible sign of a rising executive. Today the management comer is more apt to find himself sent back to school with a pack of pencils and instructions to sharpen his potential. The new corporate fad—or what one executive calls "a fever sweeping industry"—was started to combat the shortage of executives by trying to force-feed talent in the classroom instead of waiting for it to grow naturally in the office. In 1957 alone, industry sent an estimated 300,000 executives back to school in hopes that they would learn to be better bosses. The phenomenal increase in corporate collegians has sparked a high-level, academic argument: Just how much good are such training courses?

Industry's rush to answer the school bell's call has taken two main channels: company-run or management institute schools that are often as large as small colleges, and special programs at universities and colleges to improve executive minds in more academic surroundings, perhaps the most famous company college is General Electric's two-year-old advanced management course, which is given at a $2,000,000 center at Crotonville, N-Y., 35 miles from Manhattan. There top executives from every G.E. division live together for 13 weeks, attending classes and eating their meals together, sleeping in a fancy dormitory. In a four-part course they study G.E.'s managerial philosophy and the company's plans for the future, hear lectures on geopolitics, population pressures and economics, finally work on individual projects in which they produce thesislike reports, e.g., "Organization Structure Problems and the Operating Components Incident to Decentralization of Management." About half of G.E.'s permanent faculty are executives; like more and more companies, G.E. brings the rest in from college faculties. Each year G.E. puts 320 men through its course —at a cost of roughly $2,500 each.

Dozens of other companies have similar programs, including such corporate giants as General Motors, IBM, International Harvester, Alcoa, U.S. Steel and Ford Motor Co. American Telephone & Telegraph Co. has put 1,800 executives through its four-year-old management training center in Asbury Park, N.J., offers additional training for thousands of executives among its far-flung subsidiaries. Most companies see to it that their executives get courses closely related to business, but a few have bravely plunged into more cultural territory. Bayuk Cigars Inc. (Phillies, Websters) gives its executives courses in anthropology and art, is planning-to add a course in music appreciation.