Student life

Analysis considers reasons for the continuing (if shrinking) gender gap.

“I saw you... looking like a dork. But I don't care how dorky you can be. I just want you to come be dorky with me, babe.”

“I saw you... sitting by yourself and I desperately want to talk to you... but I'm too incredibly awkward to actually talk to you AND be successful... but don't worry, I'll start trying when I get back from Spring Break ;)”

This, says Keone Hon, a junior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is what happens when the romantic impulses of the college student meet the declarative instincts of the social media generation.

When asked to pick the “hottest” freshman to represent them for a Web site’s contest earlier this month, the students of Wellesley College couldn’t help but be disappointed and, frankly, offended.

A federal appeals court on Friday ruled, 2 to 1, that Virginia's alcohol regulatory board can ban alcohol-related advertisements in student newspapers. The ruling could expand a debate with both First Amendment ramifications and a significant economic impact on the college press. The appeals court reversed a lower court's ruling and the new decision conflicts with one from a different appeals court, which in 2004 found a similar ban in Pennsylvania to be in violation of the First Amendment.

The stench at one popular Massachusetts Institute of Technology study spot has gotten so out of hand that student leaders have taken action to combat it.

As colleges go through this year's rounds of fighting over commencement speakers, Connecticut College is having a painful examination of last year's student speech.

The president of Reed College was summoned on Thursday to a meeting at a federal courthouse in Oregon where federal and state authorities told him that the college must shut down drug use and distribution at the college -- starting with an all-campus party that will take place this coming weekend.

The University of California at Berkeley is an experimental place, and sometimes those experiments start as early as the summer before new students set foot on campus.

This summer, the university’s College of Letters and Science -- home to three quarters of Berkeley’s 25,000 undergraduates -- will ask freshmen and transfers to return a cotton swab covered in cells collected from their inner cheeks in an effort to introduce them to the emerging field of personalized medicine.

Instead of relying on a stuffy code of conduct to police its students – like Hinds Community College officials who received flak last week for punishing a student who cursed at a professor – officials at Onondaga Community College hope students will be able to keep their smoking, swearing, spitting, parking rage and littering in check with the help of good old-fashioned peer pressure.

College orientation programs don't yet have the power of Oprah's Book Club, but they increasingly feature books that students are asked to read over the summer or during their first week on campus -- and to discuss with their new classmates. The idea is that having every freshman read the same book builds a sense of common experience and adds intellectual content to a week that can easily be consumed by learning a college bureaucracy and socializing.