Tag: college

When a promising student left a neighborhood full of heroin for the University of Pennsylvania, it should have been a moving story. But what does an at-risk student actually need to thrive — or even just to survive?

Why are so many small American colleges like Newbury closing?

When she attends an elite private college on scholarship, Alison Stine discovers that education isn’t quite the equalizer she expected it to be.

Amid controversies and unethical practices, tech giants like Facebook and Google are no longer dream companies to work for.

In the 1960s, black students at the Ivies organized and protested for fair treatment, their personal safety, to create black studies programs, and to stop their universities from harming local black communities through expansion and urban renewal.

In the #metoo era, there’s no excuse for continuing to deride women like Maynard who speak out about their experiences with men who had much more power.

The singer’s latest performance helps expand the possibilities of what it looks like to be a black thinking person.

Lisa Romeo recalls her first college romance, when she was willing to overlook a lot — until she wasn’t.

At Buzzfeed, Kiese Laymon tells the story of his early years teaching at an elite liberal arts college in New York.

After a series of dead ends, a young man finds direction and identity in the Army. Despite his parents’ pride, the lingering question becomes: at what personal cost? 

Byers, who became the executive director of the N.C.A.A. in 1951 — a position he held for the next 37 years — transformed a toothless association into a powerful force that mirrored his own personality: secretive, despotic, stubborn and ruthless. He helped turn the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament into the financial windfall we now know […]

Indeed, the famous eclecticism of “The Waste Land,” which incorporates quotations from multiple languages and literatures, can be seen as a tribute to the educational philosophy that governed Harvard during Eliot’s time there… Yet as Crawford shows in the impressively researched Young Eliot, the “melange of topics” that Eliot explored in college “mightily enriched his poetry.” […]

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]