Audrey Cohen

Audrey C. Cohen (May 14, 1931 – March 10, 1996) was the founding president of Metropolitan College of New York, an institution known for its unique curricular structure and commitment to experiential education. An educational visionary, activist, and social entrepreneur, Cohen was convinced that people learn best when they approach their learning with an immediate, concrete purpose directed at improving the world. The college she founded continues today to provide students with a "Purpose-Centered" education that enables them to work towards a degree while developing their skills as counselors, business managers, teachers, community organizers, and human service providers.

Audrey Cohen was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and attended Taylor Allderdice High School. Diminutive in stature, smart, and energetic, she went on to the University of Pittsburgh where she majored in Political Science and Education. During her summers off from college she did volunteer work in Washington with the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) – experiences that she later said raised her awareness of social injustice and nurtured her commitment to civic activism.

Cohen graduated from college magna cum laude in 1953 and spent the next three years in Japan and Morocco with her husband, Mark Cohen, who was at the time an intelligence officer with the U.S. Navy. The young couple then returned to Washington, D.C. and began raising a family. In 1958 a desire to stay active in the workplace while still caring for her two young daughters prompted Audrey Cohen and another mother to launch Part-Time Research Associates (PTRA), an organization that enabled well-educated married women to work on specific part-time research projects contracted by businesses or government agencies.

When Audrey Cohen and her husband moved to New York City, her outreach work for Part-Time Research Associates expanded, and soon the organization was making a profit. But by early 1964 Cohen began to sense that her focus on finding part-time jobs for well-educated women was insufficient. Michael Harrington's exposé of The Other America, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, and President Lyndon B. Johnson's announcement of a "War on Poverty" in his January 1964 inaugural address contributed to a new social consciousness, and Cohen was eager to become part of the era's efforts to create more just and equitable cities. She and a small group of friends began to organize the Women's Talent Corps (WTC), an organization that would focus on jobs for low -income women who had been left behind in America's post-war economic boom.

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