Alia Wong
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Elise Amendola / AP Images Back-to-School Night Is Hard for Single Parents
Meant to be welcoming, such events can make solo parents feel isolated.
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Sean De Burca / Corbis / Getty The Most Popular Names of This Year’s College Freshmen
A university’s roster of new students is a time capsule of popular baby names from 18 years earlier, with telling variations reflecting the school’s particularities.
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Rebecca Cook / Reuters Betsy DeVos’s Extraordinary Crackdown on Michigan State
The Education Department’s record-high fine against MSU underscores the extent to which the university botched its handling of various sexual-abuse scandals.
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David Franklin / Getty Colleges Face Growing International Student-Visa Issues
Amid tightening immigration restrictions, higher-education institutions find themselves swamped with paperwork.
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James P. Blair / Corbis / Getty Family Reunions: Not Just for Grandparents
At a time when Americans are yearning for closeness, such gatherings are popular across generations.
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Gordon Parks/ Library of Congress / Getty How Twin XL Beds Took Over College Campuses
The slightly longer mattress is a compromise between schools’ economic needs and students’ physical ones.
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Lee Balterman / The Life Picture Collection / ... Colleges Would Rather Freshmen Not Choose Their Roommates
Though many new students want to choose for themselves, schools prefer to use dorms as a way to introduce young adults to new perspectives.
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Richard Vogel / AP When ‘Back to School’ Means Back to Mass-Shooting Fears
High-profile massacres have created ambient, worsening anxiety about gun violence on K–12 campuses.
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Dan Whitcomb / Reuters The Financial Calamity That Is the Teaching Profession
Teachers are suing the government over debt relief that never came—but their financial problems go much deeper than student loans.
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Courtesy of Yankton College The College That Became a Prison
Yankton College no longer exists. But it’s not fully dead either.
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Nati Harnik / AP How Schools Reinvigorated the Stonewall Revolution
Since the creation of high-school LGBTQ clubs, their mere existence has made life easier for queer youth.
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Emily Jan / The Atlantic The Surreal End of an American College
Small schools across the United States are facing budget shortfalls and low enrollment—leading some to shut down in the middle of students’ higher-education experience.
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Jim Gipe / Pivot Media / Smith College The College That Gives Graduates the Wrong Diploma
Smith College's unusual ceremony is more than just a silly tradition.
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Seth Wenig / AP The Misplaced Fears About the United States’ Declining Fertility Rate
Many women may not be abstaining from having children, but simply delaying it.
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Jae C. Hong / AP What It’s Like to Be Quarantined on a College Campus
A UCLA student talks about measles exposure at his school, his time in isolation from other students, and making a TikTok video to pass the time.
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Kevin Fleming / Corbis / VCG / Getty College-Admissions Hysteria Is Not the Norm
A focus on highly selective schools obscures the experience of the vast majority of American undergraduates.
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Mark Lennihan / AP 4 Myths Fueling the Fight Over NYC’s Exclusive High Schools
Year after year, Stuyvesant High has abysmal enrollment rates for black and Latino students. But the debate over admissions reform is brimming with misunderstandings.
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Steven Senne / AP Why the College-Admissions Scandal Is So Absurd
For the parents charged in a new FBI investigation, crime was a cheaper and simpler way to get their kids into elite schools than the typical advantages wealthy applicants receive.
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Rebecca Blackwell / AP The Consequences of Teen Motherhood Can Last for Generations
Declining rates of adolescent pregnancy come with a catch.
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Kristina Barker The Schools That Tried—But Failed—to Make Native Americans Obsolete
“Education was something that was done to us, not something that was provided for us.”
