Every morning I walk 20 minutes to the building on 23^rd street and Lexington Avenue so that I can attend my free classes, challenge myself, and learn. It’s comforting to know that had I been born 80 years earlier, I might still have had the same daily routine. While every other university was denying Jews the opportunity to study, City College was “the one major New York school that freely admitted Jews.”

Because of the depression, which made people feel as though they were “all linked to the proletariat” (the working class), and the anti-Semitism that existed, City College attracted many young Jewish students. The classes had self-motivated people who were highly competitive. One class had 2 or 3 Nobel Prize winners! However, there were also students who didn’t care how well they did as long as they didn’t “flunk out.”

This reminded me of modern day Baruch. The Macaulay program holds the students who are self-motivated. These competitive young intellectuals are the ones who gasp at the idea of getting a “B” on an IDC paper. But there are also students at Baruch who do the minimum amount of work just so they can graduate. They are not motivated to challenge themselves as much as they can, and if they were offered a “B” on a paper they would gladly accept it.

I think it is interesting that regardless of the social or economic situations, in every college there will be students who want to work hard and students who want to “just graduate.” Whether it was during the Great Depression of the 1920’s or the economic recession that we have been experiencing the past few years, or even when times are good and society at large is doing well, there will be students on both sides of the spectrum.