Photo credit: sniderscion Torontoist spent its week uncovering who was behind mysterious ads for a drug called "Obay" that popped up across the country (Scientology? Frank Shepard Fairey?), first tracing them to an advocacy group called Colleges Ontario and then confirming their suspicions a few days later.Phillyist learned how to put on a puppet show – it's not as easy as you might think!Shanghaiist discovers that the average starting monthly pay for fresh graduates......

Tonight's the Harvest Moon! The full moon nearest the fall equinox is known as a harvest moon because the moon provided extra light for harvesting crops. For most of the year moon rise occurs about 50 minutes later each day. Because of the earth's orbital geometry, around the equinoxes the moon rises only about 30 minutes later from day to day. Since a full moon rises at the same time as the sun sets, the......

Today, the NY Times had some advice for incoming first years to the city's colleges. They were:- Don’t fall asleep on the subway. - Don’t drink too much beer and use the street as a toilet. - Don’t ask a cabbie (or anyone else) to take you to “HUGH-ston” Street. - Don’t play chess for money with the hustlers in Washington Square Park. - Don’t try to swim in the river. - Don’t count......

A number of buildings with a possible connection to Brooklyn's abolitionist past and the Underground Railroad may be razed to make way for a public park and an underground parking garage. The commuter daily amNewYork reported yesterday that the Duffield Houses are slated for replacement by a public park along the lines of Manhattan's Bryant Park, mixed-use residential and commercial development, and the expansion of local colleges. Opponents to the plan include Lewis Greenstein, who......

With unseasonable weather descending upon much of North America, schools getting ready to reconvene, and sports seasons getting exciting, it's a busy time of year for us here in the Ist-A-Verse. Luckily, even with all the things we have to do, we still managed to get together to let you know what we've all been up to. After cooling down from a hot weekend of many badass Sunset Junction Street Fair photo dispatches, LAist asked......

The Princeton Review released its annual "The Best 366 Colleges" rankings, and NYC college schools make some interesting showings. The New School is number 1 for "Best College Town" (Barnard, Columbia, and NYU are also in the top 10), while Queens College is the third most sober. Here are some rankings for some area schools: Barnard: Best Quality of Life (16), Great College Towns (2), Nobody Plays Intramural Sports (18) Brooklyn College: Professor Get Low......

It's a mixed bag for Columbia today. The school was probably happy to find out that it ranked 9th in U.S News & World Report's latest top college ranking issues, but it's no fun to learn that its billion-dollar Manhattanville project was rejected by a community board committee. IvyGate got a hold of the embargoed "Annual Ranking of Best National Universities" information and found that Columbia ranks ahead of Dartmouth (#11), Cornell (12), and......

The City University of New York is planning on raising math and English requirements for 2008 freshman at 11 colleges. CUNY's chancellor, Matthew Goldstein, told the NY Times, "We are very serious in taking a group of our institutions and placing them in the top segment of universities and colleges. This is the kind of profile we want for our students." Right now, the university minimum math SAT score is 480; for students applying to......

A lot of people pick up abandoned furniture on the street, but apparently there's some good 'ol fashion dumpter diving going on around town, too. Treasures in the trash are hard to come by, and we'd be nervous about bed bugs, but for the fearless - there is free stuff for the taking. The best of which is found at Third Avenue and 12th Street as NYU students depart for the summer. The NY Times......

Yesterday, NBC News revealed that Virginia Tech shooting gunman Cho Seung-Hiu sent them a package of photographs, writings, and video - a "multimedia manifesto." The network turned over the materials to the authorities but also shared the package's contents during the evening news last night and on its website. Quickly, the images of Cho holding guns in both hands, pointing a gun at his head, pointing a gun at the camera, and more, started......

The executive director of Columbia's undergraduate financial aid office was suspended after the school - and NY State attorney general's office - found "questionable financial ties" to student loan company Student Loan Xpress. David Charlow sits on an advisory board for the company (as do two officials from UT Austin and USC who are also under investigation), and received stock options as compensation. The Higher Education Watch blog says that Charlow owned at least 7,500......

Yesterday, the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University released a study, Wasting the Best and the Brightest: Substance Abuse at America’s Colleges and Universities. Among the findings in the 244-page report (PDF here), painkiller abuse has increased 343% between 1993 and 2005, binge drinking has gone up 16% between 1993 and 2001, daily marijuana abuse doubled between 1993 and 2005, and 26% more students are getting drunk at least three......

Columbia students and faculty walked out of classes to rally and march against the war in Iraq. In fact, the Columbia Coalition Against the War called the protest a "strike" and asked professors "to either cancel or allow students to miss class unpunished" so students would be able to participate, according to the Columbia Spectator. The group did request a police permit for 200 people, but expected up to 600 people. Many students support......

Earlier this week, the Post ran another story about Esther Elizabeth Reed, the woman used other people's identities to attend colleges, mostly recently at Columbia, and made others around her suspect she was in espionage, as she tried to avoid detection. A man who dated Reed spoke to the Post and offered her letters to him. All hail email accounts where you can store email from your exes! They met on Match.com and met at......

Carlton Ingleton, an artist who also taught at Medgar Evers Colleges, was beaten to death by his son in his Crown Heights apartment. His son Assawa Ingleton had held his father, mother, pregnant wife, and their two children hostage for six hours, during which the son beat his father. The Daily News reports that when someone would try to help the father, Assawa Ingleton would hit him again. The ME's office said that Carlton Ingleton......

Development along the Hudson isn't letting up anytime soon. Now that Hudson River Park construction is well underway (and completed in some parts), proposals are being floated for refurbishing the hulking 14-acre Pier 40 terminal. The Villager has a thorough, if skewed, examination of the dualing Pier 40 visions. One, a joint venture of The Related Companies, Cirque du Soleil and the Tribeca Film Festival, calls for a Lincoln Center-style performing arts center. The......

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn may propose "hefty fines and possible jail time" for those who use fake IDS, according to the NY Post. The City Council has made nightlife safety an issue after many nightlife incidents, most notably the case of 18 year old NJ resident Jennifer Moore being kidnapped, raped and murdered after a night of drinking in West Chelsea. Currently, there is no mandatory license suspension or fine for using a......

Before the trial was supposed to begin, it was announced that the two men on trial for the murder of three students during a massive dorm fire had accepted a plea deal yesterday. In exchange for prosecutors dropping the murder charges, Joseph T. LePore and Sean Michael Ryan pleaded guilty to arson and witness tampering (which have five year sentences) in the January 19, 2000 Seton Hall fire case. The fire at Boland Hall......

The first time I saw Pete Holmes live was at the Doug Benson Interruption at the UCB, but most people's first experience with Pete probably comes from Best Week Ever, where he's a frequent panelist, or Comedy Central. Or it might be Cosmo Girl. What part of the college do you usually perform in? Most of it hinges on that question. You go through such black and white experiences doing colleges. I did a show......

There's an interesting story and graphic (above) in the Post today about public school teachers. Though the city has been attempting to hire more minority teachers, very few minorites are teaching students. Over 71% of public school students are black or Hispanic, but only 33% of the teachers are black or Hispanic. And recruitment of black and Hispanic teachers has dropped in the past years. Why is this a problem? Well, a 2004 National......

-- Some amusing news from John Gotti Jr's third trial-- he's been working on a children's book: "On one page, a cute tiger locked in a cage weeps at the site of a steaming cauldron that burns before him." -- Here's a never-before-released video of the WTC attacks taken from a tower in Battery Park City North. But beware: it's very graphic. -- Celebrities and fashionistas commemorated 9-11 the only way they know how:......

The best article we've scoured in the papers today? The NY Times article about declining numbers of black and Hispanic students at the city's top schools - even in spite of the city's best efforts to encourage them to apply and attend. And at the same time, the number of Asian students is rising to new highs at schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. There are a number of reactions, quasi-explanations, and questions in......

Hard N Phirm is comedians Chris Hardwick and Mike Phirman. In this interview they discuss patriotic dinosaurs, My Dinner with Andre, and Cop Rock. How have the college shows been going? CH: We've only done a handful of them. We did NACA (National Association for Campus Activities) in February. We did about five colleges in the spring and they got progressively better. Colleges think that comedy is this thing that you can just put anywhere......

Though these days they often gets overshadowed by NYU and Columbia, New York City is home to a large and illustrious group of institutions of higher learning. One of the greatest of those institutions is easily The City University of New York (CUNY). Though its reputation has been tarnished over the years it is still the largest urban university in the United States - 11 senior colleges, 6 community colleges, a graduate school, a......

And you thought they spent all of their time ranking the colleges you just had to go to and then spent the next 4 years doing everything but studying and now remember nothing. But the folks at U.S. News and World Report also like to make cute little lists of other things - and this time its hospitals! This week the magazine named 7 New York City hospitals in several Top 10 lists in its......

Kate Bornstein wants you to stay alive—whether you’re a “freak,” a teen, an outlaw, or President Bush (if only to give him a piece of her mind). The 58-year-old transgendered writer, who's best known for her works on gender theory such as Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us and My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely, was spurred into......

Our favorite Roller Derby Girls have lost their home. The Gotham Girls Roller Derby is in search of a new place to call home as the Skate Key in The Bronx is shutting down. As a result, the GGRD has launched "Operation Crash Pad", a " campaign to find a new practice location and game venue." Their season is scheduled to start on April 7th. As of now, there is no cut-off date to get......

The Washington Square News has an interesting article about minority students' demands for a minority lounge. The lounge would be located in Furman Hall, the new building on Sullivan Street. Obviously, the idea of a racially-segregated lounge raises some interesting questions about discrimination and equal opportunity: The all-ALSA space is not a ‘segregated’ area — all are welcome, but it should be understood that this is a place where students of color can go......

Koren Zailckas, Author of Smashed...

We don't know about you, but sometimes we find ourselves fascinated with the ways in which for-profit education works within the education community in general. Despite the large number of for-profit schools out there, unless something is going wrong they just don't get that much press, especially regarding their inner-workings. Which is why we're interested in keeping an eye on the recent troubles that have hit Technical Career Institutes (TCI) and its sister college Interboro......