Category: College

Grieving after giving up on academic life.

South African students of color are working to improve the conditions of education in a country that, twenty years after apartheid, is still rigged for the white minority.

Anniversary stories, as the saying goes, come up every year. Journalists of all experience levels look for fresh angles on these old stories. If the anniversary is of a newsworthy event, like 9/11 or the Boston Marathon Bombing, it’s even harder to find something that hasn’t already been said. Olivia Deng reported on the anniversary […]

Disappointment feels so much bigger when you’re young because you haven’t lived long enough to know that there’s always something else on the other side.

Northwestern University’s Greek-life population resembles what you see at most other private schools: white and well-off

A late-night encounter with a drunken classmate is at the beginning of many college sexual assault stories. But in the one Gracie Ryan tells, the woman—a third-degree taekwondo black belt—feels uncomfortable, gets up, and leaves.

A recent act of vandalism at UC San Diego prompted student Teiko Yakobson to wonder about the rest of a significant collection of sculpture and monumental art that dots the campus.

A lot of people make a university run, but many of those people are invisible to the students they serve. The janitors, maintenance workers, and food-service employees who keep dorms clean, buildings open, and dining halls operating can be so behind-the-scenes that students don’t think about them. (Of course, the self-absorption of youth contributes to […]

There are lots of stories these days (as there should be) about sex trafficking. The bulk of these stories focus on victims: mostly women, mostly poor, who are taken away from families and familiarities and sold for sex. In the third story in his series about human trafficking, Travis Loose turned to the law enforcement […]

When three students at the University of North Caroline were shot and killed earlier this month, The Daily Tar Heel, UNC’s student newspaper, covered and covered and covered the story.

Spencer Hall writes convincingly of the appeal of cassette tapes.

Journey Bailey played football for years and, after one concussion too many, came to in a hospital bed with a subdural hematoma. In his searing essay, Bailey writes about a football culture that kept him from revealing his symptoms to coaches who downplayed the seriousness of concussions.

This week, Wesleyan University administrators banned social events at a fraternity through the end of 2015. This rule came some months after the school decreed that all recognized fraternities must become co-educational within the next three years.”

Journalists select profile subjects for any number of reasons.

It is, like all good magazine articles, about something bigger than the initial storyline.

In her story about a tiny church for locals in a student neighborhood in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Megan Cassella merges the best of traditional journalism with the tools of today. Her narrative parallels a Sunday service, built on the familiar structural lessons of strong feature writing. She published the story on Creatavist, a publishing platform […]

Social media allows us to be passive activists, liking and hash tagging our way to political ideologies or social justice.

Readers and writers love a good true-crime story. There’s plenty of intrigue and suspense and enough intimate details to give the audience a good shiver. Stories about crime victims, however, are more difficult to report and write. Readers don’t want to pity the victim of a crime as much as cheer her on. The reporter […]

University of Pennsylvania student Manola Gonzalez found a range of sources to talk to about their drinking habits.

Introductory news writing classes teach journalism students the pure fundamentals. Facts, not assertions. Don’t take sides. When you begin to understand the rules and know how to use them, that’s when you can break them. Journalists can use their reporting to advocate with the power of a publication behind them.

For a college newspaper, there is practically no more sensational story than alleged sexual misconduct by a professor. Such a situation at the University of Delaware has all the ingredients of a great drama: a lopsided power dynamic, quid pro quo, and pleading e-mails. But to senior Cady Zuvich’s credit, she reports a tempered, straight […]

We’re pleased to bring College Longreads back for the academic year. Even if you had a productive summer, you still didn’t do as much as the 2014 News21 team. The Carnegie-Knight News21 is an investigative multimedia reporting project based out of Arizona State but staffed by student journalists from some sixteen universities. This year’s project, Gun Wars, […]

Student journalists and recent grads! Are you writing for an internship this summer? Share your work with a wider audience via College Longreads. We’ll consider published news or nonfiction articles or essays of 1,500 words or longer. E-mail links to aileen@longreads.com, or post links to Twitter tagged #college #longreads. Send us your stories

What gets published is rarely what got pitched. Sources bail, circumstances shift, conflicts fizzle. Reporting out stories that go nowhere is a frustrating, tedious business – unless, of course, they turn into something good. Such was Wyatt Stayner’s experience in putting together a story called “Getting Out of Poverty in Oregon,” this week’s College Longreads […]

Beginning writers are fond of openings stories with quotes that aren’t strong enough to lead with. Who is the speaker? Why do we care? Until they have more experience distinguishing a great quote from a merely good one, journalism instructors urge students not to open with some one else’s words. In a profile, opening with […]

College newspapers serve as incubators for the real deal, at least until your local news becomes a national story. When a big story happens, like last week’s shooting of UC Santa Barbara students, the college newspapers often have the best coverage. They know the place and the players. Trusted by and familiar to sources, they […]

Good journalism explains complicated subjects in ways that the audience can understand. Great journalism makes those subjects exciting. In his story about an organization at Boston University that’s trying to build a rocket, Jake Lucas conveys both why the students love what they do and what exactly is so difficult about it. When Lucas writes […]

Learning to capture the details that matter can take years. Beginning writers rely on physical traits to explain subjects, or do a notebook dump of descriptions that tell the audience nothing much at all. Connor Radnovich’s profile of Mike White, a Gulf War veteran with ALS, demonstrates a studied use of detail. Radnovich tells us […]

UCLA’s Daily Bruin published a comprehensive package about sexual assault on campus just days after the White House released a report outlining procedural guidelines for colleges to follow when dealing with such cases. In her thorough story about UCLA’s policies and procedures, Kate Parkinson-Morgan explains the intricacies of Title IX, the Clery Act, and other […]