In upper teen Jewish life, the non college group tends to have a sense of marginality. ``People automatically assume that I'm in college,'' a nineteen year old machinist observed irritably. However, among the girls, there are some morale enhancing compensations for not going to college. The Jewish working girl almost invariably works in an office -- in contradistinction to gentile factory workers -- and, buttressed by a respectable income, she is likely to dress better and live more expansively than the college student. She is even prone to regard the college girl as immature.

One of the reasons for the high percentage of Jewish teen-agers in college is that a great many urban Jews are enabled to attend local colleges at modest cost. This is particularly true in large centers of Jewish population like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

What is noteworthy about this large group of teen-agers is that, although their attitudes hardly differentiate them from their gentile counterparts, they actually lead their lives in a vast self enclosed Jewish cosmos with relatively little contact with the non Jewish world.

Perhaps the Jewish students at Brooklyn College -- constituting 85 per cent of those who attend the day session -- can serve as a paradigm of the urban, lower middle class Jewish student.

There is, to begin, an important sex difference. Typically, in a lower-middle class Jewish family, a son will be sent to an out-of-town school, if financial resources warrant it, while the daughter will attend the local college. There are two reasons for this. First, the girl's education has a lower priority than the son's. Second, the attitude in Jewish families is far more protective toward the daughter than toward the son. Most Jewish mothers are determined to exercise vigilance over the social and sexual lives of their daughters by keeping them home. The consequence of this is that the girls at Brooklyn College outnumber the boys and do somewhat better academically. One can assume that some of the brightest boys are out of town.