Student Employment Bureau

For more than 30 years the University YMCA was where Illinois students went to find work. The Y's general secretaries were placing students in odd jobs by 1896, and in 1897 the Y set up a Student Employment Bureau, which kept a list of local jobs. Each fall it canvassed Champaign and Urbana for jobs, and it matched students to them free of charge: waiting tables and washing dishes in exchange for board, tending furnaces, mowing lawns, washing windows and clerking. Student volunteers did most of the work, from a room in University Hall, then the Association House, Association Hall, the Hut at Wright and Green, and the Y's houses at Wright and Chalmers.

From 1913 the University helped pay for the bureau and the Dean of Men oversaw it, while the Y ran the desk. By the late 1920s a committee of 40 students found more than 4,000 jobs a year for more than a thousand students, and the bureau set rules that lasted: no fees, the neediest first, fair pay and fair hours. In the summer of 1932 the University took the work into the Office of the Dean of Men. The Y's employment secretary, Dwight F. Bracken, became its first director.