Famous Writers School - Practices

Practices

To enter the program, the course required students to submit aptitude tests, which were almost uniformly accepted. The advertisements reported that the celebrity faculty would evaluate the student's tests, a statement that Bennett Cerf, a leader of the group, admitted was false. Once a student's test was accepted, they were sent a letter filled with praise, suggesting that "you couldn't consider breaking into writing at a better time than today. Everything indicates that the demand for good prose is growing much faster than the supply of trained talent." Mitford noted that the complete opposite was true at the time, and that "the average free-lance earns just over $3000 a year." Students were required to sign a contract with the school. Cerf noted that "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."

Assignments were graded by a staff of fifty, including some free-lance writers but no teachers. The comments they provided on students' papers were described as "formulaic, often identical, responses" and as "good as you'd get from a mediocre professor in a so-so creative writing program." The cost was also "about twenty times" the cost of correspondence courses offered by universities. Students who signed up for the course were provided with "four hefty 'two-toned, buckram bound' volumes with matching loose-leaf binders for the lessons."

At the time of Mitford's reporting, the school's enrollment was 65,000 students, each of whom was paying $785 to $900 for the three-year course. Mitford reported a high dropout rate (between 66 and 90%), which she concluded was partly responsible for the school's financial success. The school employed about 800 salesmen throughout the country working on a "straight commission basis." In 1970, about 2000 veterans were signed up for the program through the GI bill at the taxpayer's expense.