we ask or claim it, but only as we make known, in a dignified and accurate way, the philosophic and scientific basis of our varied fields of endeavor, the methods we follow to attain our ends, and something of the results achieved. The Association may well become a useful instrument for interpreting to the citizenship of the country the faith and the aspirations of the social worker.

THE OBJECTIVES OF THE PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATION Neva R. Deardorff, Executive Secretary,

Pennsylvania Children's Commission, Philadelphia

While I shall attempt no psychoanalysis of any other professional group to find its motives in organizing itself, it may be well at the outset to mention the conventional objectives usually put forward. They frequently center around one or more of these ideas: first, the protection of clients against malpractice; second, the protection of the general public against imposition; third, the protection of the members of the organization against unfair competition and misinterpretation of professional ethics; fourth, the development of the science or sciences underlying the practice of the professional worker; and fifth, the development of educational resources for training the recruits of the profession.

While I think that all of these points are important to the social worker and are, of course, interrelated, the social workers of the community are not able, and will not be able in the near future, literally to copy this complete layout of objectives in their professional organization. The professional organization of the social workers must express its objectives in more subtle ways, and confer whatever distinction membership may have upon those who have evinced a serious, intelligent, and patient effort to prepare themselves to do their work well. Ours must be, certainly so far as we of this generation can look forward, a job of persuasion rather than an effort at coercion.

How can, and does, our professional organization seek to bring about a higher grade of work by its members, and to show the community that, in this field, study, preparation, and proper working conditions are essential to the achievement of lasting and beneficial results all around?

Among these ways I should like to list first the very fact of organization itself. We are almost compelled to organize. We must show the community that we care enough about our work that we will organize ourselves to improve it. Anyone who knows anything about the struggles to maintain organization for any altruistic purpose in any other field comes to have respect for any group in the community that has the will, the intellectual capacity, and the executive ability to effect an organization to carry forward its purposes. No group of people can make their influence felt on any public question-and all of social work is a public question-unless they show that they themselves can organize

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and can formulate and express their ideas through orderly channels and in concrete ways.

And now, given an organized profession of social work, what, concretely, is it that we want to tell the rest of the community? Perhaps the first message that the social workers want to convey is that, in at least some forms of endeavor, to ameliorate social conditions and to prevent and mitigate hardship and suffering-I do not say in all forms-there has grown up a body of knowledge largely based on observation, study, and experience; that this body of knowledge is now available for educational use; and that the mastery of it puts the recipient in a position where he does not need to follow a long course of experimentation and to learn by trial and error methods.

Preaching will not do the job, however. We shall not be able to prevent | people with less than the minimum preparation from doing what a community has come to see is necessary, and will support, unless we can establish a custom which will have led some young people to prepare for these jobs. But, on the other hand, we must fit our custom to the circumstances. That means orderly methods of recruiting, vocational information service, and educational resources, all functioning in response to a need which is known and measured.

Just at this moment we are not in an especially advantageous position to put the question in a clear and definite way before the public, for the reason that our demand for better-trained social workers in the future does not reflect a fact of the present. We are like the parents who have no education, but want some for their children. How many people now in the ranks of the social workers have had any special preparation for it?

The American Association of Social Workers has conducted a wide study to see how far a good many of these points that we now consider so important have come to be actual conditions within the group we recognize as the social workers of the country. How have people in the past actually gotten into social work?

You may recall that in 1921-22 the Association made an extensive canvass among social workers to collect a large number of items of information about them and the conditions of their work. Questionnaires available for use were secured from 1,258 persons: 1,030 women and 228 men. They seemed to be a fairly representative collection of people in social work. You will recall that we now have about 3,400 members, so that the number of these reports is more than a third of our present membership.

As the Russell Sage Foundation has carefully analyzed the material, and is planning to publish it, I will not go into any of the details. With the permission and cooperation of the statistical division of the Foundation, I shall draw upon this body of information for a few illustrative facts. I shall only say that its representative character is shown in many ways in the detailed analysis of the fields of work, of the geographical distribution, and in several other ways. Not

the least important is the fact that these 1,258 people were working for 677 organizations. When referring to this I shall call it the Association's study.

Now, what do we find with reference to the education of our people? In the first place, 60 per cent of the men and 40 per cent of the women are college graduates. The rest have not had so much formal general educational preparation, either for life in general or this work in particular. Nine per cent of the men and 15 per cent of the women have had a year or more in a school of social work. Combining these two kinds of education, we find that about 7 per cent of both men and women are college graduates with at least a full year's training in a school of social work. At the other end of the scale we find that 17 per cent of the women and 14 per cent of the men have had neither college nor school of social work training. That is, in a group of fourteen social workers, about two people have had neither form of preparation; one has had both, and eleven people are in between. The various combinations of some of one and some of both forms of preparation furnish a fair-sized statistical table that I shall not attempt to elucidate here. It is significant to find that the men have more college education and the women more school of social work training.

In a special study of 740 social workers in 96 agencies in Philadelphia it was found that 27.4 per cent had graduated from college. In the group of 76 executives, 34.2 per cent were college graduates; among 20 assistant executives, 40 per cent; among 131 subexecutives, 40.3, per cent; among 51 specialists, 58.8 per cent; among 220 case workers, 32.3 per cent; among 71 group workers, 19.7 per cent; among 135 public health nurses, seven-tenths of 1 per cent; and among 17 institution workers, none. Among the 740 people there were 90 who had had graduate work in a university, and 77 who had graduated from a school of social work.

Now what, if anything, do these figures mean? They mean that a portion, of varying size, of the people in the different classifications-usually a majority -are coming, or have come, into social work without any special preliminary training and without formal educational preparation.

I am happy to report that as parents we are living to see the children do better. In the Association's 1924 report on vocational service, of 1,754 registrants, over half (972) were college graduates. Of these, 340, or about 20 per cent, had done graduate work. About 25 per cent of this whole group of registrants had studied at one of the schools belonging to the Association of Training Schools for Social Work. Moreover, we do know that work in such schools is coming increasingly to mean previous college training.

There are, of course, other possibilities for learning something that might be of some value somewhere in a social work job. Among the other occupations from which these social workers had trained, the outstanding in the Philadelphia study are business, teaching (including physical training), and religious and church work. Law and medicine had furnished but a few. The same condition is found in the Association study. It is interesting that in the Philadelphia

study, an analysis of the facts with reference to whether or not these people had completed their training in these other fields show that of eighty-six that had some special education for a business career only sixteen had graduated; of eighty-one who started to normal school, but fifty-one finished; of eighteen who went in for physical training, only seven graduated; and of forty who started to prepare especially for religious and church work, eighteen finished the course. We do not know what kept these people from finishing-perhaps the great subconscious pull of social work had something to do with it, but the fact remains that social work seems to be the landing place of a good many people not specially trained for it and only partially trained for something else.

Now when do these people seem to have been moved to become social workers? Apparently the impulse may strike one at any moment from early youth to old age. We have the answer to this question carefully analyzed in the Association study based on the 1,258 questionnaires. The years between leaving high school and entering social work have been computed for men and women and in relation to educational preparation. The women with no college and no school of social work training show an interval ranging in length from one year to forty-one years, with the median coming at eleven years. That is, they are getting on toward thirty before entering social work. Rather curiously, for the men the range is one year to twenty-nine, but the median falls at nine years. That is, the median man with no preparation has in the past entered social work about two years ahead of the median woman with no training. At the other end of the scale we find that the median woman with both college and social work training enters her first social work job six years after leaving high school, and the median man, similarly prepared, is there eight years after. The median woman college graduate with no special training takes her first job eight years after leaving high school, while the median man college graduate requires ten years to land in social work. In the case of both men and women, the people who have both college and school of social work training land in social work in the shortest space of time after leaving high school.

With this information before us, it does seem that there is a great field before any organization that has for one of its motives the intelligent direction of effort of those who would enter the profession. If we can show young people a direct route, we can feel sure that the clear-headed will probably follow it.

Now by what methods shall we educate the community to use these trained young people? In my humble opinion the only real way is to demonstrate the value of preparation in our own work, clearly, simply, and unmistakably. We who claim to be professional can do this in at least two ways: (1) Take pains to know what we are talking about, have the courage to talk at the right time, and then, whenever possible, speak for our professional group. (2) Use our knowledge, our experience, and our skills only in enterprises which are of genuine social value; the big question of professional ethics enters here.

Now any organization which gives us courage, a sense of group responsi

bility, and professional pride helps us as individuals to do those things. When we have built up a body of experience of social workers who have acted with courage and intelligence we have something with which to go before the community, but we must act first, and our organization helps us to play our part. Our earlier leaders certainly gave us the best of precedents and we must maintain those ideals.

Particularly must we get before the young people who are entering the profession the picture of social work as a calling which does challenge their intellect, and their altruism. As I have been observing the recruiting for social work lately I have wondered whether we are not becoming somewhat prosaic and rather complacent. Are we putting before young people the picture of the scene in such a way as to show them that a high courage, tempered with understanding of social problems, and impersonal interest is what our field most needs now? Our professional organization can help us clarify this picture.

Next, let us turn to this question of working conditions. First, let us take salaries. The Association study shows that for the whole group of 1,258 people, the median salary for women was $1,680, and for men, $3,000. The median salary for women executives was $2,000, and for men, $3,600. Among the staff workers the median for women was $1,500, and for men, $1,800. For men with neither college nor professional school training, who had had ten to fourteen years' experience, the median salary was $2,880. For women similarly circumstanced the median salary was $1,791. Among college graduates with ten to fourteen years of social work experience the median salary for women is $2,220, and for men, $4,560. The median salary for the college graduates with a year or more of training in a school of social work was $1,800 for women and $4,000 for men. The median salary in Philadelphia for a person with graduate work is $2,150.

Before any attempt at interpretation of these salary figures is made, it would be well to review a few other factors. Age and length of experience are well analyzed in the Association's study. A little table showing the years of social work experience, in combination with the grade of positions, tells the story. In large cities the median woman executive has had seven years' experience in social work, and the man executive has had nine years. The median staff worker in both men's and women's groups has had three years of experience. In the Philadelphia study it was brought out that 36 per cent of the social workers were under thirty years of age, and that the median age for an executive was forty-one years.

Considering that a professional life entered at the age of twenty-five may reasonably be expected to last to the age of sixty, a period of thirty-five years, it does seem as if reaching an executive position with seven and nine years' experience is right in keeping with American speed. Moreover, however ancient we may feel, with the problems of the world on our shoulders, they are, after all, young shoulders.