In October, Monroe marked 75 years of bettering students with an event-filled celebration complete with spotlights, big heated tents and a slew of alumni.

Since its inception in 1933, the Jerome Avenue-based private college has evolved over the years to fit the growing needs of its diverse and expanding student body.

Founded as the Monroe School of Business, the school’s initial enrollment was just seven students. The original pupils, all women, had come at the height of the Great Depression to learn skills like stenography, so they could secure better jobs to help their families through those difficult times.

Many of Monroe’s current students come with the same enterprising spirit of those first seven women, Axelbank said.

Jason Muharran, a 20-year-old Business Administration major who was raised nearby on Fordham Road, says he tested the job market after high school, but enrolled at Monroe after he realized that he needed to equip himself with better skills in order to be competitive in today’s job market.

Indeed, with the job market shrinking, Monroe has seen an increase in new applicants interested in job training. “If the economy is bad or maybe you’re unemployed, this is a great time to build up your skills,” said Director of Admissions Evan Jerome. “You’ll be higher on the ladder. In this day and age, people need to get jobs.”

Today, during this new era of trying economic times, Monroe is 1,000 times larger (the current enrollment is around 7,300) and co-ed. Once a school with just four small classrooms, Monroe now has three separate campuses, each with its own distinct personality. They offer nine two-year associate degree programs (such as nursing and information technology), six four-year bachelor’s programs (such as criminal justice and hospitality management) and three graduate masters’ degrees in business management.

Monroe’s Bronx campus, mainly on Jerome Avenue, is composed mostly of students from within the borough and has a high percentage of part-time students. The New Rochelle campus is composed of mostly “traditional” (full-time) students, one-third of whom live on campus in dorms, and 30 percent of whom are international students. The school’s third campus, which opened in 2006, is in Castries, a city on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. It caters primarily to local St. Lucians as well as some of the school’s international Caribbean students.

Anthony Allen, the school’s vice president for enrollment management, says that as the school has expanded, so has its involvement in the community. Allen said Monroe’s facilities are open to community members (groups and individuals can reserve classrooms and gym space for meetings, practices or clubs), and that the school employs the use of mini-street sweeper vehicles to keep its surrounding neighborhood clean. Monroe’s security team, mostly former police officers, patrols the area around the college nightly.

The school’s academic offerings have diversified over the years as well.

Freshman Irene Clemente, 18, says that she recently decided to change her field of study.

“I saw our school’s culinary facilities and was so impressed,” says Clemente, who in January became a Culinary Arts major, and will begin taking classes in the school’s high-tech culinary center on the New Rochelle campus.

Monroe has also tried hard to stay on the cutting edge technologically. They’ve received acclaim for helping bridge the borough’s digital divide through a student-run program that sets up Bronx businesses with wireless Internet access and have ramped up online offerings.

Craig Patrick, Monroe’s director for online services, said each semester “over 20 percent of [Monroe’s] students take at least some online courses, so at some point during their education nearly every student takes an online course.”

Nearly five percent of Monroe’s students take online classes exclusively, Patrick said.

With all its conveniences and offerings, Monroe is making it easy for students to better themselves. As Muharran puts it, “This school is good at preparing us for the world.”

Ed. note: This story has been slightly revised from the original appearing in the print version.