International Correspondence Schools - History

History

Further information: Distance education

Enrollment in ICS courses grew explosively in the 1890s. Originally founded in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1888 to provide training for immigrant coal miners eager to qualify as state mine inspectors or foremen, it enrolled 2500 new students in 1894, leaping to 72,000 new students in 1895. By 1906 total enrollments reached 900,000. The growth was due to sending out complete textbooks instead of single lessons, and the use of 1200 aggressive in-person salesmen. By 1916 it was spending $2 million a year on magazine advertising. The dropout rates were high; only one in six made it past the first third of the material in a course. Only 2.6% of students who began a course finished it. The students dropped out because they overestimated the difficulty, had little encouragement, and had poor study habits. There was a stark contrast in pedagogy:

"The regular technical school or college aims to educate a man broadly; our aim, on the contrary, is to educate him only along some particular line. The college demands that a student shall have certain educational qualifications to enter it, and that all students study for approximately the same length of time, and when they have finished their courses they are supposed to be qualified to enter any one of a number of branches in some particular profession. We, on the contrary, are aiming to make our courses fit the particular needs of the student who takes them."

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