ning is required beyond a few days' or weeks' practice on
the job. Such training calls for a mechanical equipment far more
extensive than the resources of the school system can provide, and can
be given by the factory more effectively and much more cheaply than by
the schools.

In the final analysis, the problem of industrial training narrows down
to the skilled industrial trades. Approximately 22 per cent of the
total number of American workers in the city are employed in skilled
manual occupations. This does not mean that a constructive program of
industrial education would affect 22 per cent of the present school
enrollment. All the weight of educational opinion and experience is on
the side of excluding the children of the lower and middle age groups
as too young to profit by any sort of industrial training, while the
evidence collected by the survey goes to show that of the remainder
less than one-fifth of the girls and one-fourth of the boys are likely
to become skilled industrial workers.

AN ACTUARIAL BASIS FOR INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION

Considerations like the foregoing have determined the fundamental
method of the Cleveland Industrial Survey. Plans for the present
generation have been formulated on the basis of future prospects as
foretold by state and federal census data. The methods used were
characterized by a member of the Cleveland Foundation Survey Committee
as "the actuarial basis of vocational education." This is accurately
descriptive, because the method of forecasting the number of men the
community will need for each wage-earning occupation closely resembles
that employed by life insurance actuaries in foretelling how long men
of different ages are likely to live. Such methods are similar to
those commonly used in commerce and industry. They deal with mass data
rather than with individual figures, and with relative values rather
than with absolute ones.

CHAPTER III

THE WAGE EARNERS OF CLEVELAND

In 1910 Cleveland ranked sixth among the cities of the United States
as to number of inhabitants, with a population of approximately
561,000. The city is growing rapidly. From 1900 to 1910 the increase
in the total number of inhabitants was over 46 per cent. The Census
Bureau estimate of the population in 1914 is approximately 639,000.

Of the 10 largest cities in the country only one--Detroit--had in 1910
a greater proportion of its wage earners engaged in industrial
employment than Clevelan