Student activists in the U.S. have long championed both the Israeli and Palestinian causes.

Amid the war between Israel and Hamas, many students report feeling threatened for their opinions. Activists claim to have been doxed (when your identity is unwillingly leaked to the public) and threatened online.

Douglas Belkin and Melissa Korn speak to students affected for the Wall Street Journal. (October 2023)

Katalina Karikó won the award for helping pioneer mRNA technology, which was used to develop the COVID-19 vaccine.

Before that, she fled authoritarian Hungary, failed to earn tenure and toiled as an underpaid research assistant for years, with few taking her ideas seriously. Yet she never gave up on her research.

In this op-ed for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Dr. Priya E. Mammen insists that Karikó’s accomplishment is "nothing short of heroic."

Sonoma State University, a public institution in California, is offering guaranteed admission to any high school student who meets the minimum academic standards. In doing so, it joins university systems like the State University of New York, which sent 125,000 automatic acceptance letters last year.

The scheme could expand access to education by reaching students who otherwise wouldn’t or couldn’t apply. Universities benefit, too, by admitting more students as the number of applications drops nationwide.

Jessica Dickler has more for CNBC. (October 2023)

Part of competitive collegiate admissions is crafting a compelling narrative about yourself, and part of sales is telling a story about your product and why it matters.

Businesses and graduate schools are turning to professional storytellers to help.

Marlena Corcoran has some of their insights in Forbes. (October 2023)

Andrew Raupp, a Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) educator, contends that STEM degrees prioritize cramming facts over the thoughtful, questioning Socratic method once common in the humanities.

Read the op-ed in Newsweek. (October 2023)

The group that successfully won a landmark college affirmative action lawsuit earlier this year is suing to end raced-based admissions at the United States Military Acadamy at West Point.

According to a report from CNN, the conservative group Students for Fair Admissions is asking that the academy be prohibited from considering or knowing an applicant’s race during the admissions process. (September 2023).

A TVC News Nigeria report says that about 14,000 Nigerian students are currently studying in the United States, and more would like to join them.

But they need information about schools and the proper processes to follow. (September 2023)

Janhavi Munde, a student from India, writes about her experiences going through international student orientation at Wesleyan University in the U.S. state of Connecticut.

"We were all away from home, we were all converting kilometers to miles on a daily basis, and we would all make jokes about American food and deportation as our go-to," she writes. Read the entire piece here.

The Teen Mag takes a look at the application process at U.S. colleges and universities, specifically the Common App.

The Common App lets students apply to many universities at once via a common application. Writer Charu Yadav examines the process from an international student's point of view. Read the article here.

With the highest number of international students since the start of the pandemic, one U.S. university is conducting a program to help foreign students feel more at home.

Kent State University in Ohio hosts Conversation Partners, which pairs international students with students from the U.S.

Yui Kaichi, writing for Kent Wired, explains how the program is helping students make new friends and learn more about the world. (September 2023)

Enrollment declines and other financial pressures could lead more U.S. colleges to close or merge with other institutions, according to Fitch Ratings.

The company told Bloomberg News that half of its below-investment-grade ratings on higher education entities carry a negative outlook, Yahoo! Finance reports. (September 2023).

Within the past year, young journalists have produced investigations that led to the resignation of Stanford University's president, the firing of Northwestern University's football coach, and a school shooting graphic so striking that it led a veteran newsman to say, "I've never seen a better front page."

All while making sure to get their homework in on time.

A news industry that has been shedding jobs as long as they've been alive, and the risk of harassment when their work strikes nerves hasn't dimmed the enthusiasm of many college students — often unpaid — who are keeping the flame alive with noteworthy journalism.

"At the end of the day, journalism is a public good, and it attracts people who want to do service for others," said Theo Baker, a Stanford University sophomore whose stories about faulty scientific research prompted a university investigation and eventual resignation of Stanford's president, Marc Tessier-Lavigne.

Baker's work, as a freshman, earned him a George Polk Award in journalism, the first time Polk had ever honored work in an independent, student-run newspaper.

The Daily Northwestern's explosive interview this summer with a former football player about alleged hazing was key to the firing of head coach Pat Fitzgerald, who is suing for wrongful termination.

The Columbia Daily Spectator in New York conducted a months-long probe that found toxic working conditions within the university's public safety department. The Harvard Crimson tracked the money in an investigation into stolen funds at the Harvard Undergraduate Foreign Policy Initiative.

Students nationally are holding people in power accountable, said Jackie Alexander, incoming president of the College Media Association and director of student media at the University of Alabama-Birmingham.

"They are unafraid," Alexander said. "They are digging deep. They are really living up to the values and principles of being journalists while also being full-time students."

Charles Whitaker, dean of Northwestern's Medill journalism school, admitted to being a little worried when he heard about the story that The Daily Northwestern was working on. Yet staff members were thorough and professional, taking care to corroborate the stories they heard, he said.

"I was incredibly proud of what the students did," Whitaker said.

At Stanford, Baker's story about Tessier-Levigne was only one aspect of the complex investigations he conducted about the world of academic research, winning him impressive acclaim.

Yet when you ask how his year has been, he says it's been hell, adding an expletive for emphasis.

He's been called out of class to learn of threatened legal action. Another nasty lawsuit threat came on the day after Christmas. Professors would pull him aside to say they were impressed by his work but were afraid to be seen in public with him. One memorable post on a campus social media discussion about him said, "journalists are a cancer on society."

Baker said he was harassed — including angry, middle-of-the-night phone calls — although, incredibly, it wasn't his first time. He said he was threatened even before college because he's the son of two prominent journalists, Peter Baker of The New York Times and Susan Glasser of The New Yorker.

With growing reports of student journalists being doxxed, ostracized on campus and otherwise harassed, the College Media Association is looking into ways to help them, Alexander said.

"Being a journalist is like being under a microscope," Baker said.

Like most of her fellow University of North Carolina students, Emmy Martin spent a few terrifying hours in lockdown on Aug. 28 after a graduate student shot and killed his faculty adviser in a campus building and was on the loose before being apprehended. She was in a library and, as editor in chief of The Daily Tar Heel, spent part of her time reporting.

Martin wondered, later that night, how to cover the story on the newspaper's front page. She contemplated running a blank front page, or an all-black cover, until she scrolled through her text messages at 1 a.m.

It was a stream of texts wondering about her well-being, which she found out the next day was similar to what her friends received. She collected many of them, and decided to make the front page a block of messages that traveled from student to student:

"Are you safe? Where are you? Are you alone? Guys I'm so fucking scared. Hey — come on sweetheart — I need to hear from you. Can you hear any gunshots? Please stay safe. Barricade the door or if you think you can run and get to a place that can lock do so. My teacher is acting like nothing is happening and I'm lowkey freaking out..."

Even President Joe Biden later commented on the cover, a dramatic glimpse into the minds of Generation Lockdown. "I've never seen a better front page," veteran editor and Columbia Journalism School professor Bill Grueskin said on social media. "And neither have you."

"We didn't create the cover to make a national statement," Martin said. "We wanted to make a historical record of how everyone on the UNC campus felt that day."

The experience, she said, "reminded me of how journalism matters in more ways than just getting information to the public."

Also impressed was Raul Reis, dean of the Hussman journalism school at North Carolina. He's sure to keep the achievement in mind when he's recruiting prospective students in a tough marketplace.

"We have some very honest conversations with parents," Reis said. "Even if their son or daughter wants to go into journalism, they are concerned that it's a dying industry. I tell them it's the opposite. It's a thriving industry."

There's always a need for highly skilled individuals who are able to communicate, he said.

Almost in spite of the industry's troubles, Whitaker said there's been a strong interest in journalism schools over the past several years; many young people saw Trump-era attacks on the profession as a call to action. Students aren't just interested in shining a light on problems, but in finding solutions.

Traffic to Medill's website increased by 40% after The Daily Northwestern's hazing articles. People wanted to know more about the school teaching the young journalists, Whitaker said.

"Good journalism programs need good student newspapers," he said. "They really demonstrate the things that are being taught in the classroom in a practical way."

With local news outlets suffering, college newspapers are also covering more than campuses. The Daily Tar Heel covers the surrounding town of Chapel Hill, too. The Columbia Daily Spectator reports on the Manhattan neighborhoods of Morningside Heights, West Harlem and the Upper West Side. The University of Texas at Austin supplies students to cover state government for news outlets across Texas.

"So many people think of student journalists as students first," Martin said. "But in a lot of ways student journalists are just journalists. Just younger."

Some students at a few U.S. universities blamed Israel this week for the Hamas militants' attack on the Jewish state, drawing a sharp rebuke from academic leaders at the schools as well as from prominent alumni and potential employers.

The debate touched off at Harvard University, the alma mater of eight former U.S. presidents and perhaps the most politically influential school in the country.

A coalition of 34 Harvard student organizations said they "hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence" following decades of occupation of Gaza. They called Israel an "apartheid regime" and said it was "the only one to blame" for the war.

The statement drew the ire of prominent Harvard alumni, university President Claudine Gay, and 15 deans at the school.

In a statement, Gay and the Harvard academics said they were "heartbroken by the death and destruction unleashed by the attack by Hamas that targeted citizens in Israel this weekend."

She added, "While our students have the right to speak for themselves, no student group — not even 30 student groups — speaks for Harvard University or its leadership group."

A Harvard graduate, billionaire hedge fund chief executive Bill Ackman, and several other business leaders demanded that Harvard release the names of students whose organizations signed on to the letter supporting Hamas, although some students subsequently distanced themselves from the anti-Israel statement.

"One should not be able to hide behind a corporate shield when issuing statements supporting the actions of terrorists," Ackman said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

"I would like to know so I know never to hire these people," Jonathan Neman, CEO of the restaurant chain Sweetgreen, said on X.

One prominent New York law firm rescinded a lucrative job offer to Ryna Workman, president of New York University's Student Bar Association, who wrote in the group's newsletter that "Israel bears full responsibility for this tremendous loss of life."

Columbia University in New York City closed its campus to the public on Thursday ahead of a planned protest against the Israeli bombing attacks on Hamas-controlled Gaza. A 24-year-old Israeli student who was hanging flyers was beaten on Wednesday in front of a library on campus, one of several attacks in New York this week related to the Israel-Hamas war that police were treating as possible bias incidents.

At The George Washington University in Washington, a group of about 50 students held a vigil for Palestinian "martyrs." One organizer contended that the Hamas attacks on Israel were "not unprovoked."

There have been scattered other pro-Hamas protests in the U.S. this week, but President Joe Biden and a wide range of government officials and corporate leaders have assailed the Hamas attacks and voiced unstinting support for Israel.