Professors, Professionalism, and Profit

*Note: this transcript is from the original show broadcast. There may be slight differences from the rebroadcast.

PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: I’m Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: And I’m Brian Balogh. Today on the show, we’re looking at the history of debates about higher education in America.

ED: If you look at a list of the largest universities in the United States today, the schools holding down first and second place are not what you might expect– the big state schools in the Midwest or the south. Instead, they’re for profit colleges. As funding for public higher education has stagnated, the growth of for profits has taken up the slack. These schools now account for 9% of higher education enrollment.

PETER: But what’s interesting is that this isn’t the first time for profits have enjoyed this sort of boom. In the years following the Civil War, hundreds of so-called commercial colleges sprung up around the country. These were the years, you’ll remember, when young people were flocking to cities to take on all sorts of brand new jobs in offices and factories.

Hundreds of so-called commercial colleges sprung up across the country. Some were designed to be franchises, like Bryant and Stratton College, which hoped to open a branch in every city with more than 10,000 people. By 1886, nearly 50,000 students were attending these schools.

ED: Caitlyn Rosenthal is a historian at UC Berkeley who has written about the history of for profit education. She says the early commercial colleges taught accounting, penmanship, and bookkeeping, all the skills a student would need in the new industrial world of the late 19th century.

CAITLYN ROSENTHAL: They really emphasized the practical. And they didn’t just emphasize that in their language. They had mocked up offices so when you came to learn how to handle bank notes and practice to be, say, a bank teller, you would sit in their fake office and use their fake money to do transactions. They also tended to have pre-printed account books specialized, so you could run a whole imaginary economy. It was intended to be very hands on.

ED: Now, did these schools have a good reputation?

CAITLYN ROSENTHAL: The reputations are very mixed. There’s not a lot of good data on them early on, but in the early 1870s, the US Commissioner of Education for the first time puts a special section in their annual report on commercial colleges, and he opens this up with a kind of defense of commercial colleges. He says that it’s believed by gentleman of excellent judgment that some of these schools are just purely business speculations. However, he says that these bad schools– the cost of them is worth the benefit of the other schools that are really trying to train people up in business relations.

ED: Now, were young men and young women of modest means able to take advantage of these commercial colleges?

CAITLYN ROSENTHAL: So I think the colleges did reach a large number of men and women of modest means. Typically, if you wanted to learn to keep books, you would become an apprentice, and securing an apprenticeship in a bank or accounting house or even a business often relied on a lot of family ties and connections. In a lot of ways, this was an alternative way to gain some of those skills.

ED: And in fact, they had a clever financing plan where you could sign up for as many classes as you wanted to take. It was kind of like a gym membership today is my understanding.

CAITLYN ROSENTHAL: Yeah, they called it the life scholarship. Bryant and Stratton offered a life scholarship, and for $40, you received a scholarship that they advertised as perpetual and indefinite, which meant that it was like an all you can eat education. And if you needed to keep taking classes longer, then you could, until you were able to make yourself attractive to employers.

ED: What happened to these colleges?

CAITLYN ROSENTHAL: Well, originally I thought that they just disappeared. So I got into this because I studied the history of accounting and information systems, so I was interested in how were we having enough bookkeepers to manage these huge new multidivisional corporations that occur? So I had never heard of, for example, Bryant and Stratton, and I was writing about them in the course of my research.

And then I saw in a footnote somewhere else that Bryant and Stratton still existed. And not only that, but they had 18 campuses still in operation.

ED: There are billboards here in Virginia for them today.

CAITLYN ROSENTHAL: Just before coming on the radio, I went on their website, and I’m just kind of amazed by the spread of the colleges.

ED: Yeah.

CAITLYN ROSENTHAL: So I think there is an alternate history of these kinds of commercial colleges that might have happened. If you hadn’t seen the rise of Wharton and HBS and the other kind of what I’ll call fancy business schools of today, these commercial colleges might have become more prominent. They certainly had high aspirations.

Among the early alumni are people like Rockefeller and Carnegie and B.F. Goodrich. They really have a kind of prestigious business pedigree. And then around 1880, you have the founding of Wharton, which usually claims to be the first business school. And then Harvard Business School is in the first decade of the 20th century, I think.

ED: That’s right.

CAITLYN ROSENTHAL: And those schools paint business education in a totally different way. It’s about learning a grander set of management skills, and about making connections with other elite businesspeople. And I assumed that the rise of one coincided with the fall of the other. Like, these small commercial colleges had boomed to fill a gap that was later taken over by business education becoming important in the big universities. And it turns out they continued to operate all the way along, offering a very different set of skills to a different set of people.

ED: Caitlyn Rosenthal is a historian at the University of California Berkeley. We’ll post a link to her article on early commercial colleges at backstoryradio.org.