THE CORRESPONDENCE COURSE GOES ONLINE
Comeback of an education racket
The world's bigger
universities are now developing
distance education
through the internet, on the basis
of its effectiveness
as a learning tool. But
correspondence
instruction, already discredited at
the start of the 20th
century, is also a lucrative
business.
by DAVID F. NOBLE
"Those who cannot remember
the past are condemned to repeat it" -
George Santayana.
With the arrival of the internet,
distance learning has become hugely popular.
Universities see it as the
marketplace of the 21st century and are investing a
great deal of energy in online
services, especially in the United States. But do
those who are promoting this
transformation in higher education know the less
than glorious record of their
precursors?
Correspondence instruction began as a
commercial enterprise before taking
hold in academia (1). Thomas J.
Foster established one of the earliest private,
for-profit correspondence schools in
Pennsylvania in the late 1880s to
provide vocational training in
mining, mine safety, drafting and metalworking.
He then founded the International
Correspondence Schools, which became
one of the largest and most
enduring firms in this burgeoning industry. In 1924
these commercial enterprises, aimed
at people who needed professional
qualifications in commerce and
industry, boasted an enrolment four times that
of all the colleges, universities,
and professional schools combined. By 1926
there were over 300 such schools in
the US, with an annual income of over
$70m.
In their promotional material, the
firms claimed that they offered personalised
instruction for busy people, that
"the student has the individual attention of the
teacher [and] works at his own tempo
set by himself and not fixed by the
average capacities of a large number
of students studying simultaneously. He
can begin when he likes, study at any
hours convenient to him, and finish as
soon as he is able."
In all the firms the priority was
enrolment and most of the revenues were
expended in promotion rather than
instruction. Typically between 50% and
80% of tuition fees went into direct
mail campaigns, magazine and newspaper
advertisements, and the training
and support of a sales staff paid according to
the number of enrolments they
secured. "The most intensive work of all the
schools is, in fact, devoted to
developing the sales force," observed a 1926
Carnegie Corporation-sponsored study
of correspondence schools written
when the correspondence movement was
at its peak (2).
The pursuit of profit
tended inescapably to subvert the noble intentions - or
pretensions - of the enterprise, in
what had become a highly competitive (and
totally unregulated) field. The students
enrolled were required to pay the full
tuition fee, or a substantial part of
it, up-front and most of the firms had a
no-refund policy. Yet roughly 90% of
the students failed to complete their
course of study (3).
The remarkably high drop-out rate was
not an accident. It reflected not only
the shameless methods of recruitment
but also the shoddy quality of what was
on offer. For the actual
"delivery" of courses - the correction of lessons and
grading exams - most firms relied
upon a "sub-professional" workforce of
"readers" who worked
part-time and were paid on a piecework basis per
lesson or exam.
These people often worked under
sweatshop conditions. They had to deliver
a high volume of lessons to make a
living and could therefore not manage
much by way of pedagogical
performance. Such conditions were far from
conducive to the careful,
individualised instruction promised in the companies'
promotional materials.
All of this made perfect economic
sense, however. It was summed up in
correspondence industry jargon in the
phrase "drop-out money": once
students dropped out there was no
further expense and what remained of the
upfront payment was pure profit.
The economics of this cynical
education system meant there was no incentive
to try to keep students on by
improving the quality of course offerings. In fact
the reverse was true:
recruitment rather than instruction remained the goal.
The evolution of correspondence
instruction in the universities closely
paralleled that of the commercial
schools. It began in earnest in the 1890s,
and by the 1910s and 1920s it had
become a craze comparable with today's
passion for online distance
education. Following the lead of the University of
Chicago, other institutions joined
in, notably the state universities of
Wisconsin, Nebraska, Minnesota,
Kansas, Oregon, Texas, Missouri,
Colorado, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and
California. By 1919, when Columbia
University launched its home study
programme, there were already 73
colleges and universities offering
instruction by correspondence.
Emphasising the democratisation of
education and hoping to tap into the
lucrative market exploited by their
commercial rivals, the universities echoed
the sales pitch of the private
schools. Hervey F. Mallory, head of the
University of Chicago Home Study
Department, declared that "In the
crowded classroom of the ordinary
American university it is impossible to
treat students as individuals,
overcome peer pressure for conformity,
encourage students who are shy, slow,
intimidated by a class setting". Home
study, by contrast, "takes into
account individual differences in learning".
In short, correspondence education
was seen as more than just an extension
of traditional education. It was an
enhancement - a means of instruction less
costly and of higher quality - that
signalled a revolution in higher education.
Although they were not per se
for-profit organisations, the correspondence
programmes of the
universities were self-supporting, and therefore profit
played its part. It was initially
assumed that this new form of instruction would
be of greater economic value than
traditional classroom-based teaching, but
its pioneers soon discovered that
correspondence instruction was far more
costly to operate than they had
imagined - primarily because of the overheads
entailed in
administration. Almost from the outset, therefore, they found
themselves caught up in much the same
game as their commercial rivals:
devising promotional schemes to boost
enrolment in order to offset growing
administrative costs; reducing their
course preparation and revision expenses
by standardising their repertory and
relying on "canned courses"; and above
all keeping remuneration to a minimum
by using casual employment and
paying by piece rate.
Before long, with a degraded product
and a dropout rate almost comparable
to that of the commercial firms,
they, too, had come to depend for their
survival on "drop-out
money." At the end of the 1920s the university-based
programmes began to come under the
kind of scrutiny and scathing criticism
hitherto reserved for the commercial
schools. Abraham Flexner, one of the
nation's most distinguished and
influential observers of higher education,
excoriated the American universities
for their commercial preoccupations, for
having compromised their independence
and integrity, and for having thus
abandoned their unique and essential
social function of disinterested critical
and creative inquiry. The rush to
cash in on marketable courses and the
enthusiasm for correspondence
instruction, Flexner argued, "show the
confusion in our colleges of
education with training. The universities have
thoughtlessly and excessively
catered to fleeting, transient, and immediate
demands" and have
"needlessly cheapened, vulgarised, and mechanised
themselves," reducing themselves
to "the level of the vendors of patent
medicines" (4).
Likewise, he bemoaned as
"scandalous" the fact that "the prestige of the
University of Chicago should be used
to bamboozle well-meaning but
untrained persons … by means of
extravagant and misleading
advertisements". He assailed the
"administrative usurpation of professorial
functions" and declared that
"the American professoriate is a proletariat".
Flexner's critique of correspondence
education, which gained widespread
media attention, sent shockwaves
through academia, prompting internal
efforts to raise standards and
curtail excessive and misleading advertising. At
Columbia, the blow was eventually
fatal to the correspondence programme.
Rebirth of a 'revolution'
Thirty years later the General
Accounting Office was warning Vietnam
veterans not to waste their federal
funds on correspondence courses.
Subsequent investigations (5) and
efforts at reform and regulation invariably
failed to change the picture, even
though correspondence programmes
adopted the latest media of delivery,
including film, telephone, radio,
audio-tapes, and television.
Universities continued to offer correspondence
instruction, of course, but the
efforts were much more modest in their claims
and ambitions. Poor cousins of
classroom instruction, they were for the most
part confined to institutionally
separate and self-supporting extensions and
carefully cordoned off from the
campus proper, presumably to spare the core
institution the expense, the
commercial contamination and the criticism.
Like their forebears, today's
proponents of distance education believe they
are leading a revolution that will
transform the educational landscape. Fixated
on technology and the future, they
are unencumbered by the sober lessons of
this cautionary tale. If
anything, the commercial element in distance education
is this time even stronger. For now,
instead of trying to distance themselves
from their commercial rivals, the
universities are eagerly joining forces with
them, lending their brand names to
profit-making enterprise in exchange for a
piece of the action.
Four institutions prominent in the
correspondence movement are at it again.
The University of Wisconsin has a
deal with Lotus/IBM and other private
contractors, the University of
California has contracts with America Online
and Onlinelearning.net and the
University of Chicago and Columbia are
among the most enterprising
participants in the new distance education gold
rush. The new game is less about
generating revenues from student fees than
about reaping a harvest from
financial speculation in the education industry
through stock options and initial
public offerings.
Columbia signed an agreement with
Unext, a distance education start-up,
allowing it to use the school's logo
in return for a share in the business. "I was
less interested in the income stream
than in the capitalisation. The huge upside
essentially is the value of the
equity in the IPO," explained Columbia's
business school dean, Meyer Feldberg
(6). "I don't see a downside," he
added, betraying an innocence of
Columbia's history that would make Flexner
roll over in his grave.
Last but not least, Columbia has now
become party to an agreement with yet
another company which intends to
peddle its core arts and science courses.
Columbia will develop courses and
lend its brand name to the company's
product line in return for royalties
and stock options. According to one
source, the company has already been
busy recruiting faculty to the enterprise
as course developers and has
suggested the possibility of using professional
actors to deliver them.
For the time being, however, until
the actors arrive, the bulk of
university-based online distance
education courses are being delivered by
poorly paid and overworked low status
instructors, working on a per-course
basis without benefits or job
security and being coerced to assign their rights
to their course materials to their
employer as a condition of employment. In
short, the imperatives of commodity production
are again in full force, shaping
the working conditions of instructors
until they are replaced once and for all
by machines, scriptwriters and
actors.
There are differences between the
current rage for online distance education
and the earlier debacle of
correspondence distance education. First, although
they began to take hold in extension
divisions, commercial online initiatives
have already begun to penetrate deep
into the heart of the university. Second,
if the overheads for correspondence
courses were high, the infrastructural
expenses of online courses are higher
still. Most notably, while
correspondence programmes were often
aimed at a broad market, most of
their efforts remained regional. The
ambitious reach of today's distance
educators, however, is global in
scale, which is why the World Trade
Organisation is currently at work
trying to remove all barriers to international
trade in educational commodities.
Sometimes tragedy follows farce.
* Historian and professor at York
University, Toronto, and author of The
Religion of Technology, Alfred A.
Knopf, New York, 1997. This article is
part of the "Digital Diploma
Mills" series available online at
http://communication.ucsd.edu/dl
1.The historical account of the
university experience is based upon
hitherto unexamined archival
records of four of the leading institutions
engaged in correspondence
instruction: Columbia University and the
Universities of Chicago,
Wisconsin, and California (Berkeley).
2.John Noffsinger, Correspondence
Schools, MacMillan Company,
New York, 1926.
3.Noffsinger's survey of 75
correspondence schools, op. cit., shows that
only 2.6% of the enrolled
students completed the courses they had
begun.
4.Abraham Flexner, Universities.
American, English, German,
Oxford University Press, New
York, 1930.
5.Notably the Carnegie
Corporation-funded study by the Research
Project on Correspondence
Education, 1968.
6.The Wall Street Journal, New York, 2 April 1999.