I.C.S.'s $ 5,000,000th

The application--for a course in practical electricity--came from a soldier somewhere in the Pacific. It was delivered at the special post office in the big factory-like building on Wyoming Avenue, in Scranton, Pa. Within a few hours it was opened, sorted, approved, numbered, sent along for processing. Thus the famed, 54-year-old International Correspondence Schools matriculated their 5,000,000th student.

With millions of education-hungry veterans soon to come home, neat, reserved President Ralph Emerson Weeks and his staff were looking confidently forward to many another such milestone.

Through lucid pamphlets written by outside experts, I.C.S. teaches close to 2,000 subjects in some 400 courses, ranging from third-grade arithmetic to shipbuilding. The courses cost the students $60 to $200. Revising and expanding them costs I.C.S. up to $200,000 a year.

The school's faculty, now down to 160, has included graduates of the University of Hard Knocks as well as Ph.D.s and a Rhodes Scholar. Of its students, the 5,000,000th is fairly typical: Staff Sergeant Joseph F. Webster, of Connersville, Ind., is 25 (average student age: 27), has finished high school (average level is eighth grade), is married and about to become a father (students average one child), and most decidedly has a full-time job (over 97% of I.C.S. students are employed).

The U.S. Armed Forces Institute (TIME, Nov. 6) gets a large percentage of its courses from I.C.S., and I.C.S. also contributes most of the methods and materials to the Marine Corps Institute, the Coast Guard Institute, the Maritime Service Institute, and training courses in over 2,500 war plants and 300 railroads.

I.C.S. officials and faculty are rightfully proud of the men they have helped to fame. Among them are the late Walter P. Chrysler, Curtiss-Wright President Guy Warner Vaughan, Rifle Inventor John C. Garand, Curtis Publishing Company's President Walter Fuller, the C.I.O.'s Philip Murray. Britain's famed Cartoonist David Low got his start in New Zealand with a four-year I.C.S. cartooning course. Recently I.C.S. received a grateful letter praising "the schooling which Dad got from your correspondence course. . . ." The writer: E. N, Eisenhower, brother of the Supreme Commander.

At the other end of the scale was a Tennessean who wrote: "I intend to resume my studies as soon as my personal liberty is restored. . . . During the trial my still was brought into court as evidence. The judge, the jury and the spectators were unanimous in the opinion that it was the finest piece of coppersmithing ever seen in Tennessee. I owe it all to the I.C.S. sheet-metal course."

*For other news of Mr. Rockefeller, see RELIGION.

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