by Jeffrey J. Selingo

For much of their modern existance, distance-education courses have suffered from an image problem.

In the 1970s and 1980s, they were seen as cheap knockoffs of on-campus offerings, hawked on late-night television by the likes of Sally Struthers, who asked viewers, “Do you want to make more money? Sure, we all do,” in commercials for the International Correspondence School.