The organizers included Dr. Matthew Anderson, a leader in the city's Black community and the pastor of the Berean Presbyterian Church, which he had founded in June 1880.

In 1888, Anderson had founded the Berean Building and Loan Association, which grew to manage more than $150,000 of stock on behalf of 700 members of Philadelphia's African American community as of 1909.

His wife, Dr. Caroline Still Anderson, a physician and educator who like her husband was a graduate of Oberlin College, served as the school's assistant principal until her death in 1919.

Adult students learned arithmetic, reading and writing, bookkeeping, electrical wiring, carpentry, upholstery, sewing, hatmaking, typewriting and stenography, cooking, and waitering.

[2] In 1908, it moved from temporary quarters in the basement of the Berean Presbyterian Church to a newly constructed three-story brick building on Girard Avenue.

Enrollment plummeted to just six students in 2008, after the school lost its accreditation and after an independent audit found inadequate recordkeeping by the Institute, which had experienced at least four consecutive years of operating losses.