American Correspondence Schools in Context.

• Author: Stroup, Jane Shaw

In 2015 and 2016, Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute, two large for-profit schools providing online education, closed their doors. About the same time, others, including the University of Phoenix and DeVry Institute, experienced drastic losses in enrollment. The downfall of these schools was the result of a targeted campaign by the Obama administration and leading congressional Democrats, who charged the schools with unfair practices such as misleading promotions, low graduation rates, and high student-loan defaults (Grasgreen 2015).

In response, some educational scholars defended for-profit education. Richard Vedder (2018) emphasized its flexibility, innovation, and competition. Jayme Lemke and William Shughart II (2019) observed that when compared with community colleges, these for-profit schools' graduation rates were not that much different, and for-profits provided courses that students could not obtain at community colleges. But for the most part there was little sorrow over the shrinkage of schools that, at their height, accounted for about 10 percent of enrolled college students.

Such mixed attitudes toward for-profit schools providing distance education have a parallel in the American past. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many for-profit "correspondence schools" offered education by mail to people who, like many enrolled at DeVry or Corinthian, were too poor, too isolated, or too busy to go to college or vocational school. Like the modern distance-education schools, these schools experienced "little less than phenomenal" growth (a term used by a contemporary [Marburg 1899, 83]), and they received both derision and praise. A key difference between today's distance-education companies and the earlier ones was that in the past there were no government-provided student loans. The schools were "on their own" in their search for revenues, and for many years they did very well, even though they had no government support.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a balanced description of for-profit correspondence schools in their heady early days, using as a major tool the views of educators and educated people as the schools took shape. We will see that attitudes were quite mixed, but there was a certain amount of respect for these schools, along with curiosity about their future. Thus, serious consideration was given to the technically oriented correspondence schools in the first two or so decades of their existence.

Dramatic changes in the American economy late in the nineteenth century had made traditional ways of learning, including apprenticeships and on-the-job training, less effective than before. Colleges still followed mostly classical curricula, and the slowly growing number of engineering colleges such as Rensselaer Polytechnic sought only top-flight students. Yet businesses needed more technically trained personnel than such colleges could provide.

In his classic book The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977), Alfred Chandler shows how big companies changed their day-to-day business in the late nineteenth century. Thanks largely to the railroads, they were now able to sell to customers over vast geographical distances, a fact that spurred the creation of mass distributors such as Montgomery Ward and Sears--and, indeed, that made education by mail feasible. To meet the potential for high-volume production and distribution, companies had to create new ways of operating. Organizationally, Chandler explained, they required better factory design, managerial innovation, and higher-quality labor.

Some of that labor came from those who enrolled in correspondence schools.

Joseph Kett, author of The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties: From Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750-1990 (1994), ties correspondence schools to the American desire for self-improvement. He observes that they grew most quickly at a time when states began to require workers to pass licensure exams in various occupations from teaching to plumbing. He also noted that the expansion of high schools set the education bar higher than it had been in the past, causing people who felt left behind to try to make up for their lack of education by mail-order lessons.

James Watkinson (1996), who studied one school intensively, the International Correspondence Schools (ICS) of Scranton, Pennsylvania, argues that there was a void in the education available to most workers. "Workers who enrolled in correspondence schools sought a type of learning that would give them immediate socioeconomic mobility; they desired to enter the upper echelons of skilled occupations or, more often, enter white-collar work without engaging in traditional apprenticeships or extended formal education" (345). He estimates that more than 4 million people took correspondence courses between 1890 and 1940 (344). Another estimate is that in the mid-1920s between 1.75 and 2 million students were enrolled in correspondence schools (Noffsinger 1926, 16)--at a time when official statistics on institutions of higher education showed a total enrollment of 941,000 (U.S. Census Bureau 1999).

Historians' Neglect

Yet historians have tended to ignore the correspondence schools. The writers mentioned earlier and Robert Hampel are exceptions. "The dearth of manuscript sources helps explain the paucity of articles and books on this important segment of American education," Hampel writes. "For the universities that offered home study, there are useful primary sources, but for the private schools, much less material is available. ICS discarded nearly all of its records" (2009, 5). Hampel's article on the National Home Study Council, the group formed by correspondence schools to police their own industry, is something of a rarity because he found "verbatim transcripts" of the council's annual meetings (2009, 6). However, his paper describes correspondence schools in the 1920s, not the earliest, mostly technical schools.

Only one major historical study has been made of the largest school, ICS, an essay by James Watkinson (1996) in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. More common is the treatment of correspondence schools given in C. Hartley Grattan's history of adult education, In Quest of Knowledge: A Historical Perspective on Adult Education (1955). It relegates proprietary correspondence schools to a long footnote (319-20), even though Grattan devotes several pages to an essay on correspondence study by William Rainey Harper, who later became the founding president of the University of Chicago. Harper, who had taught Hebrew by mail to seminarians, described the strengths of education by mail without differentiating between university correspondence education and for-profit correspondence education. His essay included the statement that someday "the students who shall recite by correspondence will far outnumber those who make oral recitations" (quoted in Grattan 1959, 173-74). Grattan's treatment implies that Harper's essay is relevant only to university education.

Examples of Correspondence Schools

Let us look at a couple of for-profit correspondence schools that had staying power. ICS, founded in 1891, claimed to have more than 900,000 students by 1906 (Clark 1906, 332). True, most students did not get a diploma, and many of them became inactive enrollees. But John Jesse Clark, dean of the ICS faculty, reported in Science magazine in 1906 that between June 1, 1905, and May 31, 1906, instructors had reviewed and corrected 517,849 "instruction papers," 192,739 drawings (presumably mechanical or architectural drawings), and 6,364 phonograph records (used in language courses). Clark said that about 16.6 percent of ICS's "active" students--75,774 out of455,220--had completed one-third or more of their purchased courses, and he anticipated that the percentage would improve (1906, 332).

As Clark's comments imply, just as Sears and Montgomery Ward sent catalogs and products around the country, ICS churned out textbooks and examination papers. Watkinson describes ICS's method of teaching as a "Taylorite educational factory," in which "scores of women sitting five abreast at desks checked the students' work in assembly-line fashion" (1996, 352). Then the male principals of the "schools" or general subject areas reviewed the papers. Perhaps the genius of the ICS system was the way that the "instruction and examination papers" were written. They were simpler and clearer than most textbooks, written for people with little education but willing to learn step by step. Watkinson also says that some of ICS's advanced-engineering books were purchased by colleges and universities.

The history of ICS goes back to 1870, when Thomas J. Foster, a young Civil War veteran, founded the Mining Herald of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, with his brother-in-law (Scranton Republican, May 29, 1935). The paper's motto was: "To fear God, tell the truth, and make money." In 1885, the state of Pennsylvania passed a mine-safety law--in part due to campaigning by Foster, who had expressed alarm at the high rate of miners' accidents and deaths. The new law required mine personnel such as foremen and supervisors to pass safety examinations that posed difficult questions. Foster...