Is Brooklyn America’s Next Great College Town?
BAM President
Brooklyn is booming in every way imaginable, and people are drawn here like never before. As someone who has watched the emergence of the ‘new Brooklyn’ with great interest and pride in BAM’s role in that development, I think it’s important to mention that Brooklyn not only will be but already is and always has been a great college town, as Pratt’s ongoing 125th anniversary celebrations remind us. LIU, our neighbor, has been pursuing its mandate to educate students of all ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds since 1926. And of course where there are students, there are adventurous audiences; we are never happier than when a young person discovers the innovative work on our stages or the programming in BAMcinematek. The nearby student populations are certainly one of the reasons that we have one of the youngest demographics of any performing arts organization, and the more the merrier!
Professor of Sociology, Brooklyn College
If hipsters are the twenty-somethings of gentrification, college students are the teenage mutant version. They pile into Brooklyn’s lofts and railroad apartments, sharing rents that are still fairly low by our city’s standards but are higher than most of their neighbors can afford.
Landlords like students because they don’t demand improvements that older tenants likely require. They also move out after one or two years, allowing landlords to raise the rent.
Like gentrification, “studentification” can be a boon or a bane. The neighborhood feels younger. The pulse of the street beats faster. There are no long lines in supermarkets until afternoon.
But a growing student population also increases the power of universities over local communities. Look across the river, where NYU’s arrogant expansion riles residents of Greenwich Village. Can Brooklyn neighborhoods control the beast?
President of Polytechnic Institute of New York University
At Polytechnic Institute of New York University, the “brain gain” is being driven by the momentum of what we call i²e: invention, innovation and entrepreneurship. Our student-run Entrepreneurship and Innovation Association has rapidly grown to over 400 Poly student members (plus over 50 from other schools of NYU); our two incubators are recognized across New York City, having created 400 new jobs, provided internships or jobs for over 300 of our students; and our professors and students are inventing ever new ways to push the envelope of innovative engineering in the classroom. That is what a university does for its community. Meanwhile, our physical expansion in MetroTech Center illustrates the strength that NYU is bringing to our institution, and to Brooklyn. Together, we are creating a magnet for vibrant student life and scholarship, and for technology-driven organizations.
Founder, Electric Literature; Current CEO of Spun
I did my MFA at Brooklyn College. It was a blast, and without question Brooklyn is a great place to go to college, but having access to restaurants, cultural events, clubs, parks, diversity, and four other boroughs may not add up to a great college town. Great college towns are geographically constrained. Keeping the radius tight means that students are easily mixing, and the chance for serendipity is high. This is not to say that Brooklyn is lacking for intense experiences, but it isn’t as likely that those intense experiences happen with other college students, or that the stories of those experiences make it back into the college community and become mythic among the student body. This is always the problem with a commuter school; it can lack solidarity and shared experiences. Brooklyn’s a big place, with lots of subcultures, nooks, crannies, and goings on. Living 20 minutes from campus on the subway can cause the dreaded commuter school culture.
Strangely enough, the aspects of Brooklyn that can cause a lack of on-campus culture are the same qualities that have brought growth to the borough’s educational institutions and entrepreneur community. Brooklyn is a party; hands down, it’s fantastic. Brooklyn is a magnet right now the way Manhattan used to be; and for the most part it’s a place that, despite all the talk of gentrification, is retaining its diversity in many neighborhoods, while developing in a positive way. People find community here, and community breeds positivity and creativity, two things that send young people into education or into innovation-driven businesses.