Tuition, clothes, cars, spring break. College students will blow money on anything, as long as they don’t have to pay for it (thanks Mom and Dad!). Or, at least, as long as they don’t have to pay for it right now (loans! credit card debt!).

You know what else they’ll pay for? Housing. You know how much they’ll pay for it? A lot.

At least, that’s what real estate developers are discovering (to their delight), according to The Wall Street Journal. As long as you can put up with the occasional rager and someone vomiting into the pool every now and again, student housing pays handsomely. And because students are paying with other people’s money—either their parents’ or their future selves’—student housing has proved cheerfully impervious to market downturns.  Read More

Bright-eyed bushy tailed freshmen headed to NYU and Columbia will have to set aside their dreams of moving to New York… For the weekend, anyway. The impending inclement weather has forced both schools to postpone freshmen move-in dates until early next week. Read More

John Szwed, the author of this year’s excellent Alan Lomax biography, Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World, has been appointed the director of Jazz Studies at Columbia. He was formerly a professor in the department. Prior to that, he was the John M. Musser Professor of Anthropology, African American Studies, and Film Read More