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The Cautionary Tale of Correspondence Schools

Table of Contents

The Explosion: Growth in Correspondence School Enrollment and Abuses

In 1965, Congress enacted President Lyndon Johnson’s landmark Higher Education Act (HEA), which dramatically expanded the role of the federal government in higher education and created the Federal Insured Student Loan (FISL) program, known today as the Stafford loan program. Due, however, to the abuses of the World War II GI Bill, Congress limited access to federal student aid for correspondence schools to programs that prepared students for “gainful employment” in a specific occupation, in keeping with previous laws that barred veterans from using their GI bill benefits for recreational or avocational courses. Thus, a student couldn’t pay for a correspondence course with a federal student loan just for the “fun” of taking the course or because he believed in exploring lifelong learning—federally subsidized correspondence courses were supposed to lead to jobs.

In 1972, Congress passed the HEA amendments and enacted a second major new program of federal grants to help low-income students attend postsecondary institutions, the Basic Educational Opportunity Grants, soon to be known as Pell Grants. Unlike the guaranteed FISL loans, Pell Grants operated like scholarships, and students did not have to repay them if they dropped out of school. The law represented a new source of funding, and an important coming of age, for trade schools and home study courses. For the first time, proprietary programs were explicitly included as part of the universe of postsecondary educational institutions eligible for federal student loans and grants.1 For trade school and correspondence program salespeople, the advertising slogan “Go now—pay later” became a potent selling point with customers.2

Like the World War II GI Bill’s provision of direct tuition payments to schools, the up-front payment of tuition through guaranteed FISL loan proceeds created new perverse incentives to undermine program quality that accreditors seemed helpless to fix. In a 1974 study of accreditation, Harold Orlans and his colleagues found that “the enrollments and also dropouts of many schools rose sharply due to stepped-up recruitment, misleading advertisements, inadequate student screening…and broken promises of job placement. In conjunction with the practice of collecting the entire tuition in advance, these techniques yielded high profits, for as students dropped out, their places were quickly filled by others. So long as some tuition remained unrefunded, there was a premium on sieving large numbers of students through the doors.”3 The result, as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) concluded, was that “FISL monies have allowed marginal schools to add thousands of students to their rolls without regard for proper career training.”4

Twisted federal incentives led correspondence programs to operate as flunk-out factories.

The Washington Star gave an even harsher assessment of this federal aim scam for veterans, noting that according to FTC testimony, some correspondence schools were “designed to be flunk-out mills, whereby a student is sold a course he is expected to flunk, a course he will have to pay for.”5 A comprehensive 1968 study of correspondence instruction by the Carnegie Corporation echoed the testimony to the FTC about the profits of failure at home study schools. The Carnegie study found that “correspondence programs depend on student nonstarts [students who sign up for a course but never take a lesson] and dropouts for their financial livelihood….the nonstart who has paid a large part of his tuition generally brings a higher profit.”6

The Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs reached much the same conclusion about the twisted federal incentives for correspondence programs to operate as flunk-out factories. As George Arnstein of the National Advisory Council on Education Professions Development wrote in 1974, “Correspondence schools almost certainly would be unprofitable—judging by data submitted to the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs—if they had to process, read, and score all of the lessons students have bought and paid for. Many such schools, the committee’s legal counsel said, apparently gear their operations to the expectations that students will not complete the course, thus saving the owners millions of dollars.”7

By the mid-1970s, the number of students using guaranteed loans to attend correspondence schools and trade schools had increased dramatically, so much so that the federal administrator of the guaranteed loan program was warning in internal memos of the rise of the “FISL factories.”8 In FY 1970, just one student enrolled at the Commercial Trades Institute (CTI), a correspondence school, with a guaranteed loan; by FY 1973, 50,906 enrollees at CTI had guaranteed loans. At Advance Schools, another correspondence school, the enrollment of students with guaranteed loans increased nearly 67-fold over three years, from 1,209 to 80,891 students.9

The home study courses of the 1970s were the early and direct predecessors to the distance learning courses offered today by many colleges. Like online learning programs today, correspondence schools in the 1970s were portrayed by industry advocates as flexible and innovative postsecondary alternatives, as “the only place in America where opportunity knocks twice”10 and as vehicles for expanding educational choice. Correspondence education was to be the original school-without-walls that would free students from the constraints of rural isolation, socioeconomic class, local institutional limitations, and class schedules that conflicted with work and family time.11

Compared to traditional campus-based education, correspondence education by mail purportedly provided “easier access, independent learning opportunities, a more intimate interface with employment, better quality control over course materials, the possibility of cumulative improvement in pedagogic quality…and, under certain circumstances, lower costs.”12 Yet in practice, correspondence programs were hardly founts of innovation and often provided poor-quality education, bilking students and taxpayers out of thousands of dollars. Among those programs was the infamous case of the Famous Writers School (see Box 1).

Box 1

Famous Writers School

In July 1970, the Atlantic published its cover story “Let Us Now Appraise Famous Writers”—Jessica Mitford’s devastating, and at times wickedly funny, takedown of a huge mail-order correspondence school, the Famous Writers School. The school had 15 “Guiding Faculty” who were well-known writers, including Rod Serling, creator of the popular TV show The Twilight Zone, and Bennett Cerf, the chairman of Random House and a panelist on the long-running game show What’s My Line? The “Famous 15” appeared in ubiquitous ads in magazines and newspapers, hawking the virtues of the Famous Writers mail-order courses. But as Mitford investigated the correspondence school, she soon discovered that none of the “Guiding Faculty” actually taught at the Famous Writers School or reviewed any submissions. That didn’t stop the school from running misleading ads that implied the famous writers would be personally involved in assessing and cultivating the writing talents of students—as one ad put it, Bennett Cerf would be “at your shoulder.”13

Mitford’s investigation uncovered that the writer Robert Byrne had previously fabricated an applicant, Louella Mae Burns, who had passed the Famous Writers School “aptitude test” with flying colors. In her mock writing sample, Louella, purportedly a 63-year old widow with little education, had written a giddy essay about meeting Calvin Coolidge. “When out of the blue came a honking and cars and motorcycles and policemen,” Louella wrote. “It was really something! Everybody started shouting and waving and we finally essayed to see the reason of all this. In a sleek black limousine, we saw real close Mr. Calvin Coolidge, the President himself!” That dreadful essay drew a two-and-a-half-page typewritten letter from Donald Clark, the “registrar” of the Famous Writers School (actually a copywriter in the school’s advertising department), who stated: “Dear Mrs. Burns, Congratulations! The enclosed Test unquestionably qualifies you for enrollment…only a fraction of our students receive [sic] higher grades…In our opinion, you have a basic writing aptitude which justifies professional training.”

Mitford decided to have a neighbor send in her aptitude test to Famous Writers so she could sit in to hear the Famous Writers salesman pitch her on the correspondence course. He lied to Mitford and her friend, telling them that “two or three of the Famous Fifteen [writers] are in Westport [Connecticut, Famous Writers’ headquarters] at all times working with a staff of forty or fifty experts in their specialty, evaluating and correcting student manuscripts….Your Guiding Faculty member—could be Bennett Cerf, could be Rod Serling depending on your subject—will review at least one of your manuscripts and may suggest a publisher for it,” and “there are 300 instructors for 3,000 students,” a ratio of one instructor for every 10 students.

In a remarkably candid interview with Mitford, Bennett Cerf confessed that the school’s advertising was designed to lure the gullible into paying the then-hefty fee of $785 to $900 to sign a contract for the home study lessons. “Mail-order selling has several built-in deficiencies,” Cerf told Mitford. “The crux of it is a very hard sales pitch, an appeal to the gullible. Of course, once somebody has signed a contract with Famous Writers he can’t get out of it, but that’s true with every business in the country.”14 Cerf merrily added that “if anyone thinks we’ve got time to look at the aptitude tests that come in, they’re out of their mind!” Still, he acknowledged that the compensation to the 15 Famous Writers Guiding Faculty—nearly $10,000 a month in today’s dollars15—was “quite generous, and we were given stock in the company.”

At the time of Mitford’s interview, 65,000 people were enrolled in Famous Writers courses, with three-quarters enrolled in fiction courses, and the balance taking nonfiction, advertising, and business writing. Mitford reported that Famous Writers had 55 teaching faculty—which translated into 1,181 students, on average, per instructor. Each student was supposed to submit 24 assignments over a three-year period, which, with 65,000 students enrolled, would amount to 55 instructors having to grade 520,000 assignments a year—or nearly 10,000 assignments per instructor each year, an impossible task. Fortunately for the 55 instructors, about 90 percent of students dropped out of their courses.16 Phyllis McGinley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and children’s author who was one of the 15 Famous Writers, confessed to Mitford: “We couldn’t make any money if all the students finished.” In fact, Famous Writers’ financial model was more than the norm than the exception in the correspondence school industry. A major 1968 study of proprietary schools reported that “the typical private home study school predicts the numbers of dropouts and non-starts [those who sign up but don’t begin] and adjusts its budget accordingly.”17

After Mitford’s exposé of the Famous Writers School appeared in July 1970, profits dropped by half, from $3.5 million in 1969 (about $23 million today) to $1.6 million in 1970. The New York state attorney general, Republican Louis Lefkowitz, launched an investigation and ultimately ordered the school to pay $10,000 in costs.18 Its parent company underwent a bankruptcy reorganization by 1972, and when the Boston Globe's Spotlight team investigated the reconstituted Famous Writers School in 1974, it discovered that school salespeople were still selling the school on the basis of the same distinguished “Guiding Faculty” members, despite two, including Bennett Cerf, having died.19

Under pressure to reform its marketing practices after Mitford's article, the Famous Writers School switched from three-year enrollment contracts to letting students pay for lessons as they completed them. That switch drew the ire of the powerful National Home Study Council (NHSC), which wanted to encourage long-term contracts for correspondence courses rather than pay-as-you-go contracts; the NHSC discontinued the Famous Writers School’s accreditation in February 1972.20 The Famous Writers School limped along for the remainder of the decade and was for the most part dissolved when Covina Learning International acquired what remained of its parent company, FAS International, in 1981. From that point, up until the basic course program at Famous Writers School was closed in 2016, only about 75 to 100 students took the course.21

An FTC investigation of the Famous Writers School, launched soon after The Atlantic published its exposé of the program,22 was only the beginning of the wave of scrutiny for correspondence schools. In the early 1970s, over 2 million Americans were enrolled in some 700 to 1,000 home study schools. Fewer than 160 correspondence schools were accredited, but many of the accredited schools, like Famous Writers, had large enrollments, totaling nearly 1.5 million students.23

The explosive growth of correspondence schools was heavily fueled by federal taxpayer dollars. By December 1972, 96 proprietary institutions had become direct lender schools, meaning they had obtained federal insurance contracts and could lend money directly to students who banks otherwise might be reluctant to serve, such as those who were half-time, high-risk, or low-income. The rapid growth in direct lending at for-profit schools was largely concentrated at home study schools. At three large correspondence schools, the number of students enrolled with guaranteed student loans jumped more than 50-fold in a three-year period, from 3,972 students in 1970 to 201,731 students in April 1973, and direct lending to students at the three schools soared from $7.6 million to $81 million during the same time span.24

The U.S. Office of Education’s first efforts to curtail abuses of federal loan dollars started with regulation to limit direct lending by schools. Changes in federal practice led to restricted lending for more than 40 non-degree-granting institutions in 1973, and the suspension or limitation of another 31 for-profit colleges.25 But the fledgling USOE regulatory effort was noticeable for its modesty—even suspended lender schools didn’t lose access to all federal loan dollars, just direct lending authority. Meanwhile, the rapid growth in taxpayer-funded correspondence schools continued unabated. All told, roughly one in four students enrolled at accredited correspondence schools used guaranteed student loans.

The explosive growth of correspondence schools was heavily fueled by federal taxpayer dollars.

Veterans were even more likely than civilian students to enroll in correspondence schools. More than a third of all home study enrollees used GI Bill benefits to pay for their courses, according to a 1976 FTC report.26 The extension of educational benefits to active-duty servicemembers in the Johnson administration in 196627 had helped to boost correspondence course enrollment, since mail-order courses were popular with GIs stationed at military bases overseas and in the United States. Of the 267,000 active-duty soldiers who used education benefits in the early 1970s, 166,000, or more than 60 percent, used them for correspondence courses.28

As a rough rule of thumb, active duty servicemembers were more than twice as likely to take correspondence courses as veterans.29 Moreover, unlike courses in residential schools, correspondence courses were typically taken part-time, which servicemembers could comfortably accommodate in their schedules. In a one-year span alone, from November 1970 to November 1971, the number of veterans and servicemembers taking correspondence courses jumped almost 30 percent, from 180,000 to about 231,200.30 By 1973, 430,000 veterans and servicemembers were enrolled in correspondence schools.

Nearly 2,000 veterans took courses at Famous Writers on the taxpayer’s dime—and that figure was on the low side among the giant correspondence schools. Advance Schools, Inc., a correspondence school that went bankrupt in 1975, had more than 51,000 VA beneficiaries; Commercial Trades Institute had nearly 35,000 VA beneficiaries; and close behind was Bell & Howell Schools, with almost 34,000 VA beneficiaries.31

To put those numbers in contemporary perspective, the Post-9/11 GI Bill, enacted in June 2008, broadly liberalized educational benefits for veterans and service personnel, leading to an explosion of enrollment at for-profit schools. At the giant for-profit chain Corinthian Colleges, the number of vets enrolled tripled between 2009 and 2012 alone—to just over 6,400 veterans.32 Like Corinthian Colleges, Advance Schools Inc. eventually went bankrupt. But the correspondence school had eight times as many veterans enrolled as Corinthian Colleges near the peak of its veteran enrollment.

More troubling than the sheer dependency on taxpayer dollars was the fact that the return on taxpayer investment in correspondence courses appeared to be even worse than at brick-and-mortar proprietary schools. A March 1972 GAO report found that 75 percent of veterans did not complete their correspondence courses and only 6 percent of sampled veterans achieved the ultimate goal of finding gainful employment in their field of training.33 As is the case today, many veterans were unaware that they had to request a refund immediately for unfinished lessons if they stopped their course,34 and 134,000 veterans and servicemen who dropped out of courses had to pay an average of $180 out of their own pocket,35 the equivalent of more than $1,000 today. All told, the VA paid out more than $76 million for veterans from 1966 through 1974 who had not completed their home study courses.36

Box 2

Correspondence School Abuses of the 1970s

Tens of thousands of students enrolled in correspondence schools that took their money and taxpayer-financed federal financial aid, provided them with little education and few resources, and had terrible outcomes. Not surprisingly, once correspondence courses could be paid for with federal dollars, the types of courses that home study schools could dream up seemed almost infinite. Consider just this handful of examples:

LaSalle Extension University

In November 1973, Stars and Stripes, the military’s leading trade press publication, devoted 32 pages of coverage to a four-part investigative series on correspondence schools that marketed to GIs stationed in Europe. One giant correspondence school covered in the Stars and Stripes series, LaSalle Extension University, offered a law degree, an LLB, through home study courses and had some 10,000 of its 100,000 students enrolled in law courses. Dating back to 1937, LaSalle Extension University had run afoul of the Federal Trade Commission for its misleading advertising, especially advertisements that suggested the school’s bachelor of laws course would enable students to take and pass the bar exam.37 The FTC in the Nixon administration also thought it misleading to offer law degrees through mail-order courses, and in 1971 the FTC ordered LaSalle Extension to put a blunt disclaimer in all its advertisements for its law courses: “Completion of these courses does not qualify anyone to take the bar examination or practice law in any of the 50 states of the United States or the District of Columbia.”38

Just over half of the graduates of the university, which in 1974 was the biggest volume home study operation in the country, had gaps of at least 90 days between lesson submissions in their courses.39 For all of its permissive grading policies, LaSalle Extension had salespeople follow an aggressive five-step protocol to enroll students by manipulating the prospective applicant into thinking he had to "persuade you that he is qualified," despite having effectively no admission requirements. A Chicago Tribune reporter posing as a sales trainee was instructed by a LaSalle salesman that the carefully scripted “qualifying interview” for prospective students was a critical sale closer: “Psychologically you have him following your orders right thru the qualifying interview so by the time you get to signing the contract he can’t go against you.”40 Some salesmen, Stars and Stripes found, were even recruiting servicemen on the way to Vietnam. Stars and Stripes’ investigative report concluded that “the VA remains a big agency with big problems—or, more accurately, a number of big problems, not least of which is playing the role of moneybags for GIs yearning for an education.”41

Peace Officer Training Service

In March 1974, members of the Boston Globe's Spotlight investigative reporting team went a step further in discrediting correspondence schools. As part of an effort to test the alleged admissions process at correspondence schools, reporters did just about everything short of donning Groucho Marx glasses in their attempts to get rejected for admission, all to no avail. One Spotlight team member who applied to the Peace Officer Training Service course left blank the answer on his application as to whether he had ever been convicted of a felony and cast himself in his physical self-portrait as a “virtually blind, dwarfish diabetic, shaped like a bowling ball.” While all police agencies then had strict physical requirements for who could serve as peace officers, the reporter was promptly accepted into the $835 course. “Congratulations,” the school wrote back, “our qualification department has processed your application and are [sic] forwarding your first set of lessons.”42

Bureau of Cartooning School

Another Globe reporter, investigating the correspondence Bureau of Cartooning School, drew a primitive cartoon of stick characters in a matter of minutes that he dubbed Hippie the Hippo and Berty the Bird and submitted them to the Bureau of Cartooning School. A full-time cartoonist at a local Boston-area newspaper called the quality of the cartoons “putrid.” But the reporter was nonetheless accepted into the $400 course, with the director of the school informing him that he was well on his way to a career as a professional cartoonist for a newspaper.43

Children’s Literature Institute

Unlike many solicitations from correspondence schools, ads for the Children’s Literature Institute stated that its aptitude test was “carefully designed to uncover…natural writing ability,” so “if we feel you do not have writing talent, we'll tell you so—right on the line.” A Globe reporter’s admissions application was written to test that advertising claim. In his answer to a test question about how to cook an egg, the reporter wrote: “Grab the egg with both hands. Put it in a pot of boiling water. Pull it out when it's done. If it’s not done put in the oven. Baste occasional if it needs it.” He left one of the five sections of the test blank and listed his favorite adult author as “Moby Dick.” In the fill-in-the-blank section, the reporter had “Johnny gazing across the [dusty] waters of the lake,” while in the background “he could hear his mother [barking] in the kitchen of the [gingerbread] house.” The “dean” of the Children's Literature Institute reviewed the aptitude test and wrote back: “You are the kind of student we are looking for,” and “our standards are high.”44

Pioneer Schools

James Jackson, an investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune, discovered one correspondence school that offered a course in how to start your own mail-order correspondence school. Jackson ordered up the course from Pioneer Schools in Covina, California. The lessons showed him “how to make enrollments, place graduates, and get Veterans Administration approval on a shoestring investment.” Jackson then wrote back to Pioneer Schools and proposed a course in the “most preposterous subject he could think of to teach thru [sic] home study lessons, skydiving.” Sure enough, the head of Pioneer Schools wrote Jackson back with enthusiasm, saying “I would welcome the opportunity of writing a course for you on ‘Skydiving.’ I believe…that seven lessons would suffice.”45

Chicago-Based Schools

Many for-profits at the time had their headquarters in Chicago, and in June 1975, the Chicago Tribune published its own investigative task force series on 13 career schools and correspondence schools. The investigation concluded that the industry was “filled with fast-buck operators preying on men and women who believe education is the best way to secure a future. Countless persons seeking to become airline stewardesses, nurses’ aides, TV repairmen, truck drivers, cashiers, and interior decorators are spending $3 billion a year for correspondence and residence school courses. Many are worthless or of questionable value.”46

Citations
  1. See Lawrence E. Gladieux and Thomas R Wolanin, Congress and the Colleges (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1976), 226. Gladieux and Wolanin also note that proprietary schools had gained newfound acceptance even since 1970.
  2. Quoted in Mark Berry and Edward Dunbar, "The Proprietary Vocational School: The Need for Regulation in Texas," Texas Law Review 49 (1970–71): 102, ft. 235.
  3. Harold Orlans, N. Jean Levin, Elizabeth M. Bauer, and George E. Arnstein, Private Accreditation and Public Eligibility, vol. 2, Brookings Institution and National Academy of Public Administration Foundation, Report prepared for the Office of Planning, Budgeting, and Evaluation, U.S. Office of Education, October 1974, 412–413.
  4. Quoted in Proprietary Vocational and Home Study Schools, Final Report to the Federal Trade Commission and Proposed Trade Regulation Rule, Federal Trade Commission, December 10, 1976, 300.
  5. John Acquilino and James Norell, “Welcome Home, Soldier Boy: How Ex-Servicemen Get Defrauded in Their Search for Career Training,” Washington Star, “Washington” Sunday Magazine, October 8, 1972, 17. Emphasis in original.
  6. Ossian MacKenzie, Edward L. Christensen, and Paul H. Rigby, Correspondence Instruction in the United States (New York: McGraw Hill, 1968), 97. The Carnegie study explained that “The typical private home study school predicts the number of dropouts and nonstarts and adjusts its budget accordingly. Some of these schools refuse to reimburse nonstarts or dropouts at all….There unfortunately exist many private home study schools whose sales and promotional expenditures are so great that the schools cannot make a profit without the phenomenon of dropouts. These schools realize they must ‘oversell’ their product in order to show a profit but justify this by saying that all the students could profit from the courses,” 77.
  7. George E. Arnstein, “Bad Apples in Academe,” American Education, 10, no. 7, 13-14. Emphasis in original.
  8. Larry Van Dyne, “The ‘FISL Factories,’” Chronicle of Higher Education, X, no. 19, August 4, 1975, 4.
  9. Proprietary Vocational and Home Study Schools, Final Report to the Federal Trade Commission and Proposed Trade Regulation Rule, Federal Trade Commission, December 10, 1976, 298.
  10. Quoted in Spotlight Team, "Home-Study Schools: Con Game or Wave of the Future?" Boston Globe, March 27, 1974. Also available at Accreditation of Postsecondary Educational Institutions, 1974, Hearings before the Senate Subcommittee on Education, Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, September 12 and 13, 1974, 55.
  11. In 1971, a comprehensive literature review on the research and development of correspondence education, commissioned by the U.S. Office of Education, concluded that “correspondence study, despite its limitations and problems, has contributed greatly to meeting educational needs not met by the more traditional institutions, and in doing so has generated several directions of innovation in the whole of education.” The author went on to approvingly cite two such innovations–“proving that learning does not have to conform to the place-time limitations imposed by teachers and institutions” and “making the opportunity to learn available by self-selection, not by institutional, economical, geographical, or class determinants.” David E. Mathieson, “Correspondence Study: A Summary Review of the Research and Development Literature,” ERIC Clearinghouse on Adult Education, U.S. Office of Education, ED 047 163 AA 0000 656, March 1971, 90. In an introduction to the report, Roger DeCrow of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Adult Education predicted that “Correspondence study will be a surprisingly powerful factor in combating the engulfing educational problems of the 1970’s … correspondence study contributes to instructional systems of great flexibility, effectiveness, and economy. These are precisely the characteristics needed, if the rigidly overstructured, almost disastrously expensive, present educational arrangements are to be revamped to serve the needs of the ‘post-industrial’ society now.” Ibid, ii.
  12. Fred Jevons, “Distance Education and Campus-Based Education: Parity of Esteem,” Chapter 1, 12, in Distance Education and the Mainstream, Peter Smith and Mavis Kelly, eds. (London, U.K.: Croom Helm, 1987).
  13. Robert L. Hampel, Fast and Curious: A History of Shortcuts in American Education (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 2.
  14. Thousands of students who enrolled in Famous Writers changed their minds and returned their Famous Writer textbooks, often unopened, to get their money back. But because the students had signed a legally binding contract to repay their entire student loan, with interest, even returning the books unopened didn’t enable students to get a refund. One room of the school’s Westport headquarters had a large bin filled with nothing but textbooks that students had mailed back to the correspondence school. Famous Writers stenciled each student’s name on the textbook covers, ensuring that unused textbooks could not be reused. Instead of sending refunds to students, Famous Writers had collection agencies dun students with stern payment-due letters. As professor Robert Hampel later summed up, “The profitability of correspondence schools hinged on the dropouts who paid for what they no longer wanted.” Hampel, Fast and Curious, 12, 37, ft 27.
  15. Hampel reports that the Famous Writers “Guiding Faculty” received almost $1,500 a month per writer, the equivalent of about $9,775 in 2018. Fast and Curious, 27.
  16. Mitford was haunted by the fact that she failed to ask about how instructors put together their notes of criticism on the writing assignments they did grade. To her chagrin, she learned after her piece was published that the allegedly personally-crafted critiques students received from their instructors were cobbled together like the sections of a prefabricated piece of art by an automated typewriter—an evaluation process that gave new meaning to the concept of writing by the numbers. In the fall of 1970, the Atlantic ran a letter from a former FWS instructor who noted that “students are led to believe that each letter of criticism is personally written by the instructor. It is not. The instructor has a notebook full of prewritten paragraphs, identified by number. He consults this book and types out, not personal comments, but a series of numbers. Later, the paragraphs are written out in full by a computer-typewriter.” Mitford wrote that “I shall ever regret not having set eyes on those automated typewriters, sincerely clacking out, ‘This opening is effective. It captures the reader’s interest…’ ‘I can see you made a try at writing a satisfactory ending, but you only partially succeeded.’” Jessica Mitford, Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 176.
  17. Quoted in Walter Rugaber, “Boom in Mail-Order Schooling Marked by Dubious Practices,” New York Times, May 31, 1970, 1, 39.
  18. Jessica Mitford, Poison Penmanship, 178.
  19. Spotlight Team, "Famous Writers School, Connecticut," Boston Globe, March 31, 1974, reprinted in Accreditation of Postsecondary Educational Institutions, 1974, Hearings before the Senate Subcommittee on Education, Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, September 12 and 13, 1974, 77.
  20. Paul Starr, The Discarded Army, 295, ft. 74.
  21. Magdalen Livesey (owner of Cortina Learning International), interview with author, January 5, 2017.
  22. Robert Hampel reports that four of the Famous Writers’ Guiding Faculty were subpoenaed by the FTC in early 1971, including Rod Serling, who testified that he only knew the name of two instructors at FWS. After the New York State attorney general negotiated revisions to Famous Writers’ ads, the FTC decided not to move forward with a potential cease-and-desist order for the mail-order school. Robert L. Hampel, Fast and Curious, 30.
  23. Testimony of William Fowler, executive director of the National Home Study Council, in Proprietary Vocational Schools, Special Studies Subcommittee of the House Committee on Government Operations, July 1974, 251. Famous Writers subsequently lost its accreditation but for several years it maintained its VA approval for veterans to use their GI bill benefits to pay for tuition.
  24. Harold Orlans, N. Jean Levin, Elizabeth M. Bauer, and George E. Arnstein, Private Accreditation and Public Eligibility, Vol. 2, Brookings Institution and National Academy of Public Administration Foundation, Report prepared for the Office of Planning, Budgeting, and Evaluation, U.S. Office of Education, October 1974, 401–402.
  25. Ibid., 413–414.
  26. Figures cited in Proprietary Vocational and Home Study Schools, Final Report to the Federal Trade Commission and Proposed Trade Regulation Rule, Federal Trade Commission, December 10, 1976, 34.
  27. In 1965, the biggest provider of correspondence instruction in the United States was the military. Correspondence study provided directly by the armed forces was free and was limited to training for military service and promotions. However, in 1943, the military established the U.S. Armed Forces Institute (USAFI) to provide correspondence courses for members of the military who were looking to continue their civilian education. By 1964, the USAFI provided some 200 correspondence courses of its own, and made available another 6,000 correspondence courses through contract with the extension divisions of about 40 participating colleges and universities. Servicemembers took USAFI courses to complete elementary, high school, and college requirements or to explore technical and vocational subjects. According to a comprehensive Carnegie Corporation study of correspondence education, the armed forces provided 60 percent of all correspondence study in 1965, with 1.76 million servicemembers enrolled, while USAFI accounted for 4 percent of correspondence study, with 117,000 servicemembers enrolled. (By comparison, for-profit home study schools then enrolled 656,500 students, 22 percent of all correspondence study students). USAFI courses in technical and vocational subjects had a mixed reputation among active duty servicemembers, enabling for-profit correspondence schools to expand dramatically after the 1966 GI Bill allowed active duty servicemembers for the first time to use their educational benefits to enroll in proprietary correspondence courses. For the Carnegie Corporation study, see Ossian MacKenzie, Edward L. Christensen, and Paul H. Rigby, Correspondence Instruction in the United States (New York: McGraw Hill, 1968), 8-9, 35-36, 51-55.
  28. Paul Starr, The Discarded Army: Veterans After Vietnam (New York, NY: Charterhouse, 1973), 250, 258.
  29. As of May 1976, 66 percent of Vietnam-era active duty service personnel used their GI Bill benefits at postsecondary programs—primarily at correspondence schools—that did not provide associate or bachelor's degrees, compared to 29 percent of veterans. All told, by May 1976, 37 percent of Post-Korea GIs, or 2.26 million veterans and service members, used their GI Bill benefits to take postsecondary courses that did not lead to a standard college degree. Cited in Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, Veterans' Education and Employment Assistance Act of 1976: Report of the Committee on Veterans Affairs to Accompany S. 969, S. Rpt. No. 94-1243, 94th Cong., 2nd Sess., September 16, 1976, 29–30.
  30. Information Bulletin DVB IB 24-72-1, Department of Veterans Benefits, Veterans Administration, January 18, 1972, 2.
  31. James Bowman et al., Educational Assistance to Veterans, 185.
  32. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Majority Committee Staff Report, Is the New G.I. Bill Working? For-Profit Colleges Increasing Veteran Enrollment and Federal Funds, July 30, 2014, 3–4, 8.
  33. General Accounting Office, Report to the Congress, “Most Veterans Not Completing Correspondence Courses—More Guidance Needed from the Veterans Administration,” B-114859, March 1972, 8.
  34. The Government Accountability Office identified $416 million in Post-9/11 GI Bill overpayments in fiscal year 2014 for one in four veteran beneficiaries for classes they did not complete at about 6,000 schools. “Post-9/11 GI Bill: Additional Actions Needed to Help Reduce Overpayments and Increase Collections,” GAO Highlights, GAO-16-42, October 2015, 1.
  35. James Bowman et al., Educational Assistance to Veterans, 179.
  36. Proprietary Vocational and Home Study Schools, Final Report to the Federal Trade Commission and Proposed Trade Regulation Rule, Federal Trade Commission, December 10, 1976, 207.
  37. In 1937, the FTC issued a cease-and-desist order against LaSalle Extension University that barred the correspondence school from using the term “University” or “Extension University” in its corporate name and from representing, directly or indirectly, that the home study school conducted a university or an extension university. The FTC order noted that the school’s claim to be a “university” or “extension university” misled students into thinking the school operated like a university with a college of arts and sciences, connected to a graduate or professional school, and with a faculty of “learned persons acting as instructors.” In addition, the FTC maintained that “A university is not organized for private profit of the owners of its stock or pay dividends thereon. A university does not secure registration of students through the medium of a corps of salesmen who are paid on a commission basis.” 24 F.T.C. 1286, May 19, 1937, see especially 1295-96. A year later, the FTC modified its order, allowing the school to use “Extension University” in its name, so long as it inserted immediately afterwards, in equal-size type, the phrase “a correspondence institution” or “an institution for correspondence students.” 26 F.T.C. 1277, May 18, 1938.In 1954, during the Eisenhower administration, the FTC issued another cease-and-desist order against LaSalle Extension University that required the mail-order school to stop representing that students who completed its Bachelor of Laws courses were eligible to take, and had the legal training to be admitted to, the bar examinations of their respective states. In 1950, just four states allowed students who had studied by mail-order only to sit for the bar exam. The FTC concluded that the school had “falsely represented” that its graduates “will be eligible and enabled through such training to participate in the bar examinations … [LaSalle’s] misrepresentations to prospective students manifestly have had the capacity and tendency to deceive members of the purchasing public into the erroneous and mistaken belief that such representations are true and to induce the purchase of a substantial number of respondent’s courses.” 50 F.T.C. 1083, June 29, 1954, see 1087. By 1971, when the FTC amended the 1954 order against LaSalle, effectively no state allowed students who had taken their courses solely by correspondence to sit for the bar. The FTC continued to find the school’s advertising for the school’s L.L.B courses (Bachelor of Laws) to be “false, misleading and deceptive” and ordered the school, to prominently disclose—again, in equal-size type–that its courses were “not recognized or accepted as sufficient education or legal training to qualify the student to become a candidate for admission to the profession of law in any of the States in the United States or the District of Columbia.” In a separate opinion, FTC Commissioner Mary Gardiner Jones wrote that “the consequences of the slightest ambiguity or capacity of respondent’s advertising to mislead are of the most serious kind. Young students who respond to respondent’s advertising will invest both their funds—and more important—three years of their life in pursuing their life’s career goal … it may not be until after [three years have passed] that students will discover that their financial investment has been for naught and that they are no nearer their career goal than when they started. This is the cruelest hoax of all.” 78 F.T.C. 1272, June 24, 1971, see 1295-96. In 1980, the FTC issued a much more sweeping cease-and-desist order against LaSalle Extension University. The 1980 order applied to most of the school’s programs, extending well beyond its law training courses. The new order barred the correspondence school from misrepresenting the opportunities for employment, earnings, licensing requirements, and job demand in a host of programs in prospective students’ field of training. 96 F.T.C. 208, Sept. 4, 1980.
  38. George Eberl, “LaSalle and the Law,” Stars and Stripes, November 15, 1973, A2. LaSalle Extension University was owned at the time by the MacMillan Publishing Company.
  39. Cited in Constance L. Belfiore, “Proprietary Vocational School Abuses: Can the FTC Cure Them?” Catholic University Law Review, Vol. 24, Issue 3, Spring 1975, 621, ft. 93.
  40. Tribune Task Force, “Fast Talkers Sell Dotted Line and Little Else,” Chicago Tribune, June 11, 1975, 1, 8.
  41. George Eberl, “VA: The People Who Pay,” Stars and Stripes, November 15, 1973, A3, part three of a Stars & Stripes In-Depth Report, “Correspondence Schools and the Military Market.”
  42. Spotlight Team, "A Stamp and Some Money Get Anyone into Dreamers' Schools," Boston Globe, March 31, 1974, reprinted in Accreditation of Postsecondary Educational Institutions, 1974, Hearings before the Senate Subcommittee on Education, Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, September 12 and 13, 1974, 74–77.
  43. Ibid.
  44. Ibid.
  45. James A. Jackson, “You, Too, Can Be an ‘Educator,’” Chicago Tribune, June 10, 1975, 8.
  46. Tribune Task Force Report, “Career Schools—Results Seldom Equal Promise,” Chicago Tribune, June 8, 1975, 1.

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The Explosion: Growth in Correspondence School Enrollment and Abuses

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The Cautionary Tale of Correspondence Schools