Top College Headlines in 2013
Top College Headlines in 2013
Many of the big headlines surrounding universities and colleges this year evoked a feeling of deja vu. Several of the big stories of 2012 - soaring student debt, for example, and law school remorse - continued to fester and roil. But there were plenty of new issues too, from meningitis outbreaks to new ways to sabotage a college application.
The biggest story of the year, of course, was the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, when two pressure cooker-bombs exploded at the finish line of the big race, killing three people, including a Boston University graduate student, and injuring 264 more, some grievously.
Officials at Boston College, Boston University, Tufts and other campuses scrambled to locate their students, hundreds of whom were running or volunteering that day.
A church at Boston College, which is at mile 21 of the 26 mile race, became a staging ground, offering food, water and shelter for runners. And at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, students, staff and faculty went into mourning after a young campus police officer was shot and killed, police said, by one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects during a manhunt that lasted through the night.
Top College Headlines of 2013 - Meningitis Outbreak
College parents everywhere got a reminder about why meningitis vaccines are so important after a meningitis outbreak at Princeton University, followed by another outbreak at UC Santa Barbara this fall.
The New Jersey Health Department issued an alert after six cases were diagnosed between March and October. By December, that number had risen to eight and special vaccines were being flown in from Europe.
The problem? This particular strain - serogroup B - is not covered by the immunization nearly every college student gets before heading off to the dorms freshman year. The vaccine covers types A, C, Y and W-135. The B vaccine is licensed for use in Europe and Australia, not the United States, but federal officials issued a waiver so that Princeton students could be vaccinated.
Meanwhile in Santa Barbara, four students fell ill with the same B strain. Three recovered relatively quickly, but one, a young lacrosse player, was so ill, his feet were amputated.
Top College Headlines of 2013 - Food Allergies
Food allergies are spreading at a dramatic rate, impacting families, children and college students too. Students with severe food allergies, especially potentially fatal peanut and shrimp allergies, face those university dining halls with justifiable trepidation. Now that may be changing.
A landmark settlement at Lesley University in Boston has pushed the issue under the umbrella of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Now students on that campus who have serious food allergies or celiac disease - and by extension, on any U.S. campus that doesn't want to run afoul of ADA - are entitled to more than a bin of peanut-free offerings in the chow line. At Lesley, the agreement calls for individual meal plans for students with allergies, staff training, separate food prep areas and other major changes designed to keep students safe.
Top College Headlines of 2013 -Tech Overload
We parents may have considered ourselves cutting edge back when we left for college, armed with electric typewriters and bottles of White-Out for erasing typos. Our kids start freshman year armed with laptops, smart phones, tablets and game consoles - and they're shocked when they discover the wi-fi connection at school doesn't match up to what they had at home.... or at Starbucks.
All that super connectivity is taking a toll on university IT departments, whose campus networks are grappling with the enormous increase in the the number of devices students are bringing to school.
At one university, the number of devices rose by 260% between 2012 and 2013, with the average student bringing 2.5 devices on campus. And those tech tools are eating up significantly more bandwidth. Six years ago, there was no such thing as an app - or a cell phone that could send pictures. What happens when smart watches, Google Glass and the next big thing shows up?
2013 College Headlines - New Ways to Sink a College App
As if the college admissions game wasn't anxious enough, along came three new ways to sink a college app - one displaying epic stupidity, one deeply malicious and one just plain insidious.
The New York Times delved into the story of a Bowdoin College applicant who spent her college admissions information session indulging in ill-advised tweets. Her crude, rude and snarky commentary on fellow session participants caught the eye of college officials who, like most admissions officers, keep tabs on their social media mentions.
It's not just GPA and test scores that matter, the Bowdoin dean said, it's character too.
The college admissions world was abuzz in October over the college admissions sabotage tale emerging at New York City's Horace Mann prep school, where a member of the "school community" - a student, staffer, teacher or parent - attempted to torpedo a senior's college prospects by sending a letter filled with damaging and untrue claims to admissions officers at several universities.
As for the insidious method of self-sabotage... It turns out the FAFSA, those financial aid forms U.S. families fill out each January, may be undermining your child's college application. When your child answers the question about which schools should receive his financial aid information, FAFSA tells admissions officers which school(s) is your child's first choice - and which are at the bottom of the list.
Those Spanish or French requirements aren't just a high school thing. Foreign languages are required in college too, and many universities offer an entire range of classes, from Spanish 101 to Russian, Pashto, Akan and Zulu. But a recent survey by the Modern Language Association found that American Sign Language - which was only offered by a few universities back in the 1990s - is one of the most popular language courses on U.S.
college campuses. Spanish, French and German lead the pack. ASL rose to fourth place this year.
Concerns about sports-related concussions and traumatic brain injuries continued to spread this year. In 2011, some schools began limiting tackles and similar body contact during football practice in an effort to reduce the number of injuries - and a group of college athletes filed a class-action lawsuit against the NCAA over head injuries that had gravely impacted once-straight A students.
In 2013, the concerns began spreading to other college sports as experts realized: It's not just football or rugby.
A National Academy of Sciences report issued in November 2013, noted that field and ice hockey, wrestling, and women's soccer, lacrosse and basketball have concussion rates on par with football.
Many of the big headlines surrounding universities and colleges this year evoked a feeling of deja vu. Several of the big stories of 2012 - soaring student debt, for example, and law school remorse - continued to fester and roil. But there were plenty of new issues too, from meningitis outbreaks to new ways to sabotage a college application.
The biggest story of the year, of course, was the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15, when two pressure cooker-bombs exploded at the finish line of the big race, killing three people, including a Boston University graduate student, and injuring 264 more, some grievously.
Officials at Boston College, Boston University, Tufts and other campuses scrambled to locate their students, hundreds of whom were running or volunteering that day.
A church at Boston College, which is at mile 21 of the 26 mile race, became a staging ground, offering food, water and shelter for runners. And at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, students, staff and faculty went into mourning after a young campus police officer was shot and killed, police said, by one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects during a manhunt that lasted through the night.
Top College Headlines of 2013 - Meningitis Outbreak
College parents everywhere got a reminder about why meningitis vaccines are so important after a meningitis outbreak at Princeton University, followed by another outbreak at UC Santa Barbara this fall.
The New Jersey Health Department issued an alert after six cases were diagnosed between March and October. By December, that number had risen to eight and special vaccines were being flown in from Europe.
The problem? This particular strain - serogroup B - is not covered by the immunization nearly every college student gets before heading off to the dorms freshman year. The vaccine covers types A, C, Y and W-135. The B vaccine is licensed for use in Europe and Australia, not the United States, but federal officials issued a waiver so that Princeton students could be vaccinated.
Meanwhile in Santa Barbara, four students fell ill with the same B strain. Three recovered relatively quickly, but one, a young lacrosse player, was so ill, his feet were amputated.
Top College Headlines of 2013 - Food Allergies
Food allergies are spreading at a dramatic rate, impacting families, children and college students too. Students with severe food allergies, especially potentially fatal peanut and shrimp allergies, face those university dining halls with justifiable trepidation. Now that may be changing.
A landmark settlement at Lesley University in Boston has pushed the issue under the umbrella of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
Now students on that campus who have serious food allergies or celiac disease - and by extension, on any U.S. campus that doesn't want to run afoul of ADA - are entitled to more than a bin of peanut-free offerings in the chow line. At Lesley, the agreement calls for individual meal plans for students with allergies, staff training, separate food prep areas and other major changes designed to keep students safe.
Top College Headlines of 2013 -Tech Overload
We parents may have considered ourselves cutting edge back when we left for college, armed with electric typewriters and bottles of White-Out for erasing typos. Our kids start freshman year armed with laptops, smart phones, tablets and game consoles - and they're shocked when they discover the wi-fi connection at school doesn't match up to what they had at home.... or at Starbucks.
All that super connectivity is taking a toll on university IT departments, whose campus networks are grappling with the enormous increase in the the number of devices students are bringing to school.
At one university, the number of devices rose by 260% between 2012 and 2013, with the average student bringing 2.5 devices on campus. And those tech tools are eating up significantly more bandwidth. Six years ago, there was no such thing as an app - or a cell phone that could send pictures. What happens when smart watches, Google Glass and the next big thing shows up?
2013 College Headlines - New Ways to Sink a College App
As if the college admissions game wasn't anxious enough, along came three new ways to sink a college app - one displaying epic stupidity, one deeply malicious and one just plain insidious.
The New York Times delved into the story of a Bowdoin College applicant who spent her college admissions information session indulging in ill-advised tweets. Her crude, rude and snarky commentary on fellow session participants caught the eye of college officials who, like most admissions officers, keep tabs on their social media mentions.
It's not just GPA and test scores that matter, the Bowdoin dean said, it's character too.
The college admissions world was abuzz in October over the college admissions sabotage tale emerging at New York City's Horace Mann prep school, where a member of the "school community" - a student, staffer, teacher or parent - attempted to torpedo a senior's college prospects by sending a letter filled with damaging and untrue claims to admissions officers at several universities.
As for the insidious method of self-sabotage... It turns out the FAFSA, those financial aid forms U.S. families fill out each January, may be undermining your child's college application. When your child answers the question about which schools should receive his financial aid information, FAFSA tells admissions officers which school(s) is your child's first choice - and which are at the bottom of the list.
Those Spanish or French requirements aren't just a high school thing. Foreign languages are required in college too, and many universities offer an entire range of classes, from Spanish 101 to Russian, Pashto, Akan and Zulu. But a recent survey by the Modern Language Association found that American Sign Language - which was only offered by a few universities back in the 1990s - is one of the most popular language courses on U.S.
college campuses. Spanish, French and German lead the pack. ASL rose to fourth place this year.
Concerns about sports-related concussions and traumatic brain injuries continued to spread this year. In 2011, some schools began limiting tackles and similar body contact during football practice in an effort to reduce the number of injuries - and a group of college athletes filed a class-action lawsuit against the NCAA over head injuries that had gravely impacted once-straight A students.
In 2013, the concerns began spreading to other college sports as experts realized: It's not just football or rugby.
A National Academy of Sciences report issued in November 2013, noted that field and ice hockey, wrestling, and women's soccer, lacrosse and basketball have concussion rates on par with football.
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