“We were the children of peddlers, tailors, first-chance Americans, and everybody pointed to the city colleges and said, ‘This is your opportunity; take it.’…Brooklyn College to me and to many other children of immigrants represented the Statue of Liberty” -Sam Levenson, class of 1934 (Horowitz, 9)

The pages of the Broeklundian (Brooklyn College Yearbook) were mainly filled with Jewish students throughout the early 1930s.

In its inaugural years, Brooklyn College was not the hub of ethnicity that it is today. The relatively small classes of the early 1930’s were almost entirely composed of white students, most of whom were Jewish. There were no more than two or three African-Americans in the Broeklundian, the Brooklyn College yearbook, in those years. Although the students had almost homogenous ethnic backgrounds, the various clubs they were in seemed to contradict that. There was a French Club, a German Club, an Italian Club, a Greek Club, and a Spanish Club, just to name a few, and the surnames of the officers did not necessarily match the cultures and languages they represented. Rather, this demonstrated the student body’s wide variety of interest in other cultures other than the one that the students belonged to. There were also religious groups, such as the Newman Club for Catholic students and the Menorah Movement for Jewish students. The most popular career choice for Brooklyn College students in the 1930’s was teaching, a field which one third of the students chose to go into, according to the Journalism Club, even though there were not many jobs open in this field during the Depression-era New York (Horowitz, 9).

Brooklyn College in the 1930s

The financial power of students back then was not so much different of the students today. Brooklyn College has always been a public institution, and therefore, its comparatively low expenses for a higher education appealed to many students who came from low to middle income families. For approximately two decades, the student population was “predominantly composed of first-generation Americans, the children of working-class and middle-class parents…” (Horowitz, 35) In 1933, a student organization called Members of the Bureau of Economic Research did a demographic and monetary analysis of their colleagues. The findings of this study support the significance of attending a public university and the socioeconomic status

Brooklyn College 1936 Yearbook

of the college’s students. They indicated, “…that more than 90 percent lived in Brooklyn, and that while more than four out of five families neither owned a pleasure car nor an electric refrigerator, the same proportion did enjoy the luxury of a radio…. College-related expenses for Brooklyn students—and these would exclude rent—were estimated to be $6.60 a week in 1934” (Horowitz, 13). Nonetheless, students struggled to pay for their education despite the low tuition. The difficulties that the Depression Era presented emerged inside the classroom as well. Many students could not even “afford the minimal outlay for a copy, new or used.” This situation made professors think twice about requiring their students to buy even one textbook, when students were already making great efforts in sharing a valuable text with a friend or going elsewhere like other libraries to find resources. (Horowitz, 24) Amidst of all these circumstances, Brooklyn College served as one of the best options for a local and more affordable higher education.