New Light on the History of Correspondence Schools

Abstract

New Light on the History of Correspondence Schools Robert L. Hampel (bio) What we now call distance education began long before computers linked students and teachers. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, hundreds of private companies, public universities, and enterprising individuals sold instruction by mail. Nearly any subject could be pursued, but vocational training was the best seller. The company that dominated the field, enrolling nearly 100,000 new students annually in the early twentieth century, was in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where its massive headquarters was known as the Big Red Schoolhouse. By comparison, the largest proprietary school in Philadelphia, Peirce College, never enrolled more than 2,000 students until World War I.1 The International Correspondence Schools (ICS) found its historian in 1996, when James Watkinson published an article in this journal.2 He described the practical slant of the organization’s textbooks, analyzed its enticing ads, profiled students from two cities, and concluded that ICS was a reputable vendor of the technical know-how that could help such ambitious adults as Arthur Godfrey, Eddie Rickenbacker, Walter Chrysler, Dwight Eisenhower’s father, and the inventor of Scotch Tape get ahead. Watkinson’s valuable article said little about ICS after the 1920s; his paper traced the rise of a behemoth rather than its later life. In addition, he relied on published sources because the ICS archives were so meager—no correspondence to and from ICS staff, no annual reports to shareholders, no legal records, and no letters from students.3 The few primary sources Watkinson missed—ICS advertisements in the National Museum of American History, the autobiography of an ICS advertising manager, the notes of an Italian immigrant who took carpentry and masonry—reinforce what he found elsewhere.4 [End Page 373] Two boxes in the William Warren Scranton Papers at the Special Collections Library of Pennsylvania State University shed light on ICS from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s.5 William Scranton’s father was on the Board of Directors when thirty-two-year-old Scranton Jr. joined the company in 1949 as its vice president for legal affairs. Although the younger Scranton left in 1954, he rejoined the Board of Directors after his service in Congress, a term as governor of Pennsylvania, and an unsuccessful run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1964. Scranton’s papers illuminate the financial ups and downs of ICS and reveal the risks of rapid expansion. From the annual reports, correspondence with ICS officers, press releases, and handwritten notes, historians can trace the lures and the perils of becoming a conglomerate. In the 1940s and 1950s, ICS rebounded slowly but steadily from the sharp loss of students during the Depression. The GI Bill briefly pushed enrollments to 115,018 in 1947, but that was the only time when ICS equaled the peaks of 1900 to 1925. The company recruited around 70,000 new students each year in the 1950s; a profitable book publishing division grew more rapidly. By the early 1960s, the annual revenue of approximately twenty million was triple the comparable figure from the early 1940s, with the stock price doing much better: from a low of one dollar in 1942, it rose to ten dollars by the early 1950s and continued to climb throughout the decade. The annual profits grew faster than the annual sales in the 1950s, and in a strong market the shares did well. The Scranton files reveal that ICS went on an acquisition binge in the 1960s, when for-profit education and publishing firms entered what investors today call a bubble. The market for schooling in many different forms seemed limitless, and stock prices skyrocketed. The company had seven suitors in 1961, but it wanted to buy rather than sell. By the end of the decade, InText (as it renamed itself) owned three vocational schools, a book distributor, an audiovisual company, a training program for overseas corporations, and five niche publishers. Annual sales began to surge in 1963, and the $22,349,000 in that year soared to $52,255,000 ten years later. But profits peaked in 1967, declined for the next three years, and became losses in the early 1970s. Some of the acquisitions were...