At the time of its founding in early 1949 the Union of Communist Youth (Uniunea Tineretului Comunist--UTC) was looked upon as the youth branch of the PCR. It was set up with much the same organizational structure as the party and, in practice, functioned both as a youth political party and mass organization. Resulting from the party-decreed merger of all existing youth organizations, the UTC was given the task of educating the young in the spirit of Marxism-Leninism and mobilizing them, under the guidance of the party, for the building of socialism. In early 1972 the UTC continued to be one of the most powerful of the mass organizations in the country, with an estimated membership of 2.5 million. Membership was open to young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-six; those who have reached the age of eighteen could also become members of the PCR. The Tenth Party Congress, meeting in 1969, introduced the requirement that young people up to the age of twenty-six would be accepted into the party only if they were UTC members. Decisions on persons to fill the most important leadership positions in the UTC were made by the PCR Central Committee. The structure of the UTC has undergone a number of changes since it was originally established. In early 1972 the organization functioned on the national level with an eight-member Secretariat, including the first secretary who is also the UTC chairman, and a bureau of twenty-one full and seven alternate members. In each of the thirty-nine countries and the city of Bucharest there exist UTC committees that are similarly organized with secretariats and bureaus. The UTC has its own publishing facilities and publishes its own propaganda organ, _The Spark of Youth_ (Scinteia Tineretului). Statistics on the composition of the youth organization, reported at the Ninth UTC Congress held in February 1971, indicated that the membership consisted of 30 percent workers, 39 percent students, and 17 percent peasants. The remainder consisted of those who were classified as intellectuals, clerks, and office workers. Periodically throughout the 1960s PCR leaders demonstrated growing concern for what they termed as shortcomings in the political education of the nation's youth. In 1968 this concern led to the establishment of the Research Center for Youth Problems and an increased effort to instill in the young people a sense of "socialist patriotism." Ceausescu asserted the need for all levels of education to be permeated with Marxist-Leninist ideology and placed particular emphasis on ideological training in the universities.