Abstract

"The Rise and Decline of American Correspondence Schools"

Jane Stroup, North Carolina State University (janeshaw5966@gmail.com)

In The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, Alfred Chandler showed how the railroads made it possible to sell products to customers over vast geographical distances. This opportunity spurred the creation of mass marketers like Montgomery Ward and Sears and high-volume producers like Standard Oil and U. S. Steel. To succeed, the new industries needed technically trained workers and white-collar bookkeepers and managers.

Apprenticeships and on-the-job training were no longer sufficient because technical “book” knowledge was required. Yet most colleges still followed classical curricula, and engineering colleges such as Rensselaer Polytechnic sought only top-flight students. At the lower level, high schools were still in their infancy, and few were vocational. Where were the practical engineers, the mining surveyors, the down-to-earth architects, and the quality-control inspectors to come from?

While there is no simple answer, the 1890s saw the development of three new kinds of education, one private, two public. Private technical education burst onto the scene in the form of correspondence schools; public technical education emerged more gradually in the form of land-grant agricultural colleges and vocational high schools.

This paper reconstructs the history of the schools that lost the race, the correspondence or instruction-by-mail schools. My goal is to show how these schools filled a temporary gap in the nation’s educational system and how multiple changes, from public expenditures on education to Americans’ increasing mobility, doomed them. The paper includes a brief historiography; descriptions of three leading schools, the International Correspondence Schools of Scranton, Pennsylvania, founded in 1891; the Sprague Correspondence School of Law (1890); and the Alexander Hamilton Institute (1909); how contemporary educators viewed the correspondence schools; and, finally, what forces led to their decline.