BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF PHOENIX. In the stack of old Railroad magazines I received, there's evidence of a onetime thriving industry in personal improvement. This advertisement from the mid-1960s offers a representative pitch: enhance your promotion potential and your earning capacity at your own pace. The vendor, International Correspondence Schools of Scranton, Pennsylvania (in those pre-1-800-MY-SUCCESS days) appears to have metamorphosed into Thomson Education Direct, also doing business as ICS in Canada and in the UK.


The advertisements of that era attempted to strike a balance between shame and aspiration. A typical theme was the worker hampered by the lack of a credential and looking for a better way to provide for his family.

The existence of training and credentialing services offering second, or third, or n-th chances is not something to apologise for: enough people are born into tough circumstances or have to be mugged by reality that it's fitting and proper for a pulp magazine published for such an audience to communicate the existence of such services. In what little I've learned, however, about the history of higher education in that era, in which state normal schools were evolving (or is it mutating?) into research institutions somewhat like their land-grant neighbors, I have seen nothing about the legislators or administrators viewing International and the other precursors of distance-learning providers as a competitive threat.