Business schools.

Before the mid-nineteenth century, an apprenticeship was required to learn to be a businessperson. The apprentice would begin as an office boy and work his way up in an organization. These apprenticeships were usually poorly paid and occasionally unpaid positions. During the 1830’s, private proprietary business schools began operating in major cities to provide, in a few months, the training that it might take an apprentice several years to learn. B. F. Foster, who had written books on accounting, started a commercial school in Boston in 1834 and then in 1837 moved to New York, where he started Foster’s Commercial Academy. Other authors of business books soon followed, starting schools in other eastern cities. Such schools were common by the start of the U.S. Civil War. Traditional colleges were reluctant to offer business courses, so the proprietary schools had a monopoly on the subject. The most successful of the proprietary schools were those owned by H. B. Bryant, H. G. Stratton, and Silas Packard. By the 1870’s, these names were almost synonymous with business education. In fact, companies competed to hire “Packard boys” and eventually “Packard girls,” because graduates of these schools, branches of which existed in many cities, were known to be well trained.