Dear Old Usafi

In spare moments between the hottest fighting on Guadalcanal, about 40 U.S. servicemen swatted mosquitoes, sweated over correspondence-school lessons. When they had done their homework, they mailed it to the University of Hawaii, a branch of Usafi (U.S. Armed Forces Institute). Last week the number of fighting men taking correspondence courses from Usafi was not far from 30,000, more than half of them overseas.

Some students on the rolls last week:

> Sergeant Albert Joseph Erickson of Chicago, on duty with a South Pacific mobile reconnaissance squadron. His third test paper on the duties of a railroad rate clerk was held up: "A little of the real McCoy popping over here."

> Corporal Luther Leroy Roberts of Virginia, fuse-setter with an overseas anti-aircraft battery, after taking a premedical course at Washington, D.C.'s Howard (predominantly Negro) University. He was late with his trigonometry test papers; some "have been destroyed by tropical insects."

> Lou Ella Thomas of Georgia, WAVES third class yeoman. She was brushing up on English grammar in Atlanta, where she has a Navy clerical job. > Seaman First-Class Marvin R. Eienbass of Michigan, studying on the high seas to be an automobile mechanic. In six lessons he has had no grade lower than 88.

Usafi, the alma mater of these students, is at Madison, Wis. Supervising from Washington's Pentagon Building is Harvard's onetime Education School Dean Francis Trow Spaulding, now a colonel in the Army's Special Service Division.

Usafi offers 64 courses to men of all services at $2 each. Courses include English and social studies, mathematics and sciences, business, mechanical, electrical and engineering trades. In addition, Usafi splits with servicemen the higher cost of any of 700 correspondence courses given by 80 U.S. universities. Example: for about $10 a serviceman may delve into the history of pre-Civil War Dixie, Canada, Russia or ancient Israel. Successful Usafi students get certificates, and many colleges will give them credits.

Sturdy at 70. Ever more respectable, U.S. correspondence teaching is now 70 years old. The pioneer in 1873 was Boston's Society to Encourage Studies at Home. The oldest existing institutions were founded in the early 1890s: the International Correspondence Schools and the University of Chicago's Home-Study Department. Today the draft has decimated the younger enrollment. But vocational subjects have gained in appeal and many older people are retooling by mail. Estimated total enrollment: 900,000, of which university extension courses account for 150,000.

The Hays office of the correspondence-school industry is the National Home Study Council set up after a Carnegie Corporation survey in 1926. Director is the man who made the survey, John Samuel Noffsinger. The Council standardizes practices, investigates frauds, cooperates with the Federal Trade Commission (correspondence teaching is interstate commerce), improves teaching methods. Since the Council started, about 17 diploma mills have been shut down, as many as 13 fraudulent schoolmasters have been in jail at one time, and the fantastic profits of phony schools have largely been squeezed out.

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