Integrating Placement with the Student Personnel Program

Abstract

If we are to do more than merely acknowledge placement as an essential student personnel service, and if we are to do more than merely give “lip” service to the need for integration, then I firmly believe that the following prerequisites must be met: 1. That the responsibility for placement services must be definitely assigned. 2. That the individuals charged with the administration or coordination of placement services be responsible to the office having over-all administration and coordination of all student personnel services. 3. That there be qualified personnel to discharge effectively the duties and responsibilities incident to placement and follow-up services. An attempt has been made in this presentation to indicate the limitations, from the point of view of integration, of a placement program dependent entirely on the efforts of individual instructional departments, schools or colleges within an institution. This was in reference, of course, to those institutions in which there were no central placement or coordinating offices. If the foregoing prerequisites have been met, then it would seem relatively easy to identify areas of integration as well as to develop specific techniques of integrating placement with the student personnel program. Admittedly, I may have been thinking in terms of perhaps the “ideal” or the optimum program, but should we set our sights any lower?