When It Comes to For-profit Distance Education and Correspondence Courses, History Repeats Itself: Report

David Whitman's The Cautionary Tale of Correspondence Schools was cited in this ELearningInside article which takes the reader through the history of distance learning and correspondence courses.

Among these proposals, DeVos initiated the process of doing away with the gainful employment safeguards that ask institutions to publish data regarding the professional success of their graduates, along with the mandate that ensures institutions provide ‘regular and substantive interaction’ between instructors and students. These measures stand to significantly impact the for-profit and online higher education sector. Many policymakers and journalists approach these issues as if they represent new territory. We have never, after all, taught learners via digital technology at the current scale at which it occurs, and that has produced a series of new advantages and disadvantages. But according to the liberal-leaning New America’s education policy researcher David Whitman, the debate over for-profit (de)regulation stretches back to correspondence courses. It is nothing new.

As Whitman writes, “a look back at history reveals that the regulations that Secretary DeVos plans to rewrite or eliminate have their origins in abuses of federal aid dollars by an earlier form of distance education—correspondence programs, the precursor to today’s distance education.”

When eLearning Inside digests the many excellent and well-researched reports put out by American think tanks across the political spectrum, there are typically numerous conclusions or takeaways to glean from them. With Whitman’s The Cautionary Tale of Correspondence Schools, however, there is just one: When it comes to for-profit distance education, history has repeated itself over and over again.

Correspondence programs date back to the early 19th century. But widespread for-profit abuses of these programs, according to Whitman, began with the G.I. Bill following the conclusion of World War II.

“In the five years that followed Franklin Roosevelt’s signing of the 1944 law, the total number of for-profit schools in the United States tripled, from 1,878 to 5,635,” Whitman writes. “Thousands of new ones opened to serve veterans, and thousands more, ill-suited to provide an education, closed. Contrary to conventional wisdom, more veterans actually used their educational benefits to attend for-profit schools than went to four-year colleges and universities. And many of those programs utilized correspondence education. While 2.2 million vets went to college on the GI Bill, 2.4 million GIs used their educational benefits to enroll in trade and technical and business schools, with another 637,000 veterans taking correspondence courses.”

“Tens of thousands of veterans trained for jobs in overcrowded fields in which there were no job openings. G.I.s who wanted to collect their monthly subsistence checks but had no clear educational or occupational objective were allowed to switch willy-nilly from one field to another. And thousands of veterans signed up for recreational or avocational courses, many offered by correspondence, like bartending, personality development, dancing, and auctioneering. Others had the VA pay for TV repair courses and then dropped out of their courses as soon as they got their promised free television. In 1949 alone, nearly 550,000 veterans made course changes.”