Illustration from a 1916 advertisement for International Correspondence Schools, Scranton, Pennsylvania, a vocational school, in the back of a US popular science magazine. During the Industrial Revolution, income inequality in the US was very great, and education was seen as a route to social mobility. This advertisement uses the threat of poverty to recruit students.

Part of advertising copy that appeared below the picture:

"Here is your future charted for you, based on the actual average earnings of trained and untrained men. Which way will you go? You'll either go up, through training, to a position that means good money and more comforts as the years go by, or you'll go down, through lack of training, into the ranks of the poorly paid."