It's that time of year when institutions of higher learning heartlessly eject their seniors into the real world! Princeton grads were treated to the best speech of the season; Stephen Colbert delivered a zinger-filled address (above) in which he wisely reminded grads that "no one will ever, ever want to hear you sing a capella" outside college. How true. But plenty of other colleges tapped A through Z-list celebs to brace their soon-to-be-discharged students for entry into the workforce.

What are alumni magazines for? I always thought they were just a fund-raising tool posing as publications. After all, Grove City College sends mine along with donation requests, even though I dropped out a semester early to work for Gawker Media (which means I have a good twenty years to pay off my college loans before I think about handing over more money voluntarily). But the New York Times says their most important role is "dormitory common rooms for grown-ups." And now Facebook is replacing alumni magazines as the gathering place for graduates (and drop-outs!). Makes sense to me; I never thought of writing into GCC's alumni mag to report on my career, but I'll update my job title on Facebook and I do have all my college friends there. What about people who graduated before Facebook? Are you switching your social life to the site? Did you ever use your alumni mag for that sort of thing?

Students at Northwestern are apparently outraged that their school selected stupid Chicago mayor Richard Daley to speak at commencement. Boooring! They wanted John McCain, the Dalai Lama, or last year's speaker, Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Some whiny Northwestern kid emailed the school's president, who actually responded with some amusing sniping:

Finally, some good news for the students Dartmouth lecturer Priya Venkatesan (we can spell her name without looking it up now! Christ!) tried to sue, or is maybe still trying to sue, or who at the very least will soon end up in her tell-all book. The writing class they took with her last semester is now retroactively pass/fail! School officials "reviewed the grades she gave to students in the Winter term and have concluded that they were not consistent with the feedback that she provided to the students." So said Associate Dean Lindsay Whaley, who will now be added to the lawsuit, in the court of make-believe. [Dartmouth Review]

Click to viewA Dartmouth lecturer is suing her class for discrimination, as she revealed in a series of regrettable and bizarre emails that promptly ended up all over Dartmouth blogs. Priya Venkatesan (Dartmouth '90, MS in Genetics, PhD in literature) emailed members of her Winter '08 Writing 5 class Saturday night to announce her intention to seek damages from them for their being mean to her. The email, and so, so much more, below:

Aww... It's the class of 2008! All growed up and coming to NYC for that awesome career and super apartment like in Friends or Sex and the City? Sorry, little camper, we don't serve your kind! "The thousands of new graduates who will be driving the engine of the city's rental market from now until September will quickly learn that renting in New York is not like renting anywhere else. The second shock is likely to be how small a Manhattan apartment can be. It is not uncommon in New York, for example, to shop for a junior one-bedroom or a convertible one-bedroom, neither of which is a true one-bedroom at all but really a studio that already has or can have a wall put up to create a bedroom."

Go Elis! Only not. In the past ten days, we've had larceny charges against an aspiring Galie and pseudo abortion, pseudo art project from senior Aliza Shvarts. It's enough to make Harvard appealing. But on a beautiful spring day like this, when faux controversies surround art and reproductive rights, we do sort of miss college. Where else could a debate over Shvarts's "art" not immediately conclude with, "she's a savvy media whore who is willing sell her name, body and college intuitions for publicity." It's nearly impossible to pick the most offensive aspect of this little project. That Shvartz maybe lied to create publicity, that maybe Yale lied to protect itself from a student, or what she actually claimed to do, which is to induce miscarriages to get people "to think." It's like we're caught between a world of The Hills and Abortion Art. Can't there be a happy medium, like Top Chef?

When Facebook isn't invading privacy, it's occasionally rolling out features we don't despise. Their new application Lexicon culls words and phrases from users' walls to create fun charts. In the "party tonight" "hangover" match-up, the latter curiously tends to spike shorty after the former. (Click image to enlarge). Another comparison reveals that people "lol" way more than they "omg." Well, if the kids don't have god, at least they have laughter. Hit up the comments with other fun conclusions about the modern era drawn from the Facebook lexicon. [via Fimoculous]

New research shows that wealthy college students will trade sexual favors to get what they want. Researchers interviewed 475 undergraduate students and discovered that 25% of them would exchange sexual currency for provisions. The attempted trades included: tickets to the University of Michigan vs. Ohio State game, studying assistance, laundry washed, a Louis Vuitton bag and voice lessons.

Colleges are now trying to lure prospective students by amping up their dining hall menus, adding fancy foods like lobster and something called "pho." "I didn't apply to Bates, because, well, I ate there, the meal was not very good," says Lucas Braun, a 17-year-old senior at Westtown School. Hey, college food is bad for a reason. So you'll spend less time in the dining hall and more time learning shit. Now get back to studying so we don't have to waste time teaching you everything four years from now when you're our intern.

Woof! Our plagiarism dog is on the case, sniffing out copying. Journalism students at NYU are launching NYU Local, a "24-hour" campus news blog, and are plagiarism trouble already. An article from the official campus newspaper, Washington Square News, was on their site as a placeholder before pre-launch. But they put one of their writer's bylines onto the article, which has since been removed but is cached here. We hear that the advisor for this rowdy group is NYU Journalism Chairwoman Brooke Kroeger. We'd suggest a shorter leash! Update: the editors of Washington Square News say, "We were in contact with NYULocal's editors about this issue over the weekend. They promptly reassured us that this was a mistake — a leftover placeholder article from when they were designing their site, which has not yet launched. They apologized, [and] removed the article in question... we see no reason to doubt them on this matter and are satisfied with that response."

College students at 65 separate institutions are actively play Quidditch, the fictional game J. K. Rowling invented for the fictional character Harry Potter. As one Middlebury student says in this clip from CBS News, "when you put this broom between your legs, you really are flying." Ok, dude. Excelsior! If Harry Potter is the only thing that can save publishing, then maybe the industry deserves to die.

Former Jezebel intern and attempted Paris Hilton free-er David Seaman was on Fox's Morning Show With Mike and Juliet today to talk about Salvia, the hot new (legal!) drug that's taking America's colleges by storm. "They told me I'd be on to talk about why I'm in favor of keeping certain drugs legal," Seaman said in an email to friends and colleagues, "and why many college students agree that some decriminalization for soft drugs makes sense." He had a little argument worked out and everything! But he was on The Morning Show With Mike and Juliet so they actually just sat him next to some mook who posts clips of kids having bad trips on YouTube and interviewed a doctor who says all the drugs will cause deadly car crashes. Then they introduced a girl whose brother killed himself on the Salvia! Seaman's entertaining email describing his ordeal is after the jump. A brief clip is attached.

New York University announced a plan last Friday to save $25 through an administrative hiring freeze and restructuring. While the school announced the plan in the name of efficiency and passing the savings onto the students, a memo from NYU President John Sexton placed the blame squarely on NYU's "high ratio of dreams to resources," also calling out "a world where financial markets are in turmoil, the US economy and currency are weakening, and our elected officials are raising serious questions about higher education." Not to mention that today's generation of high school students has never even heard of Felicity, and the Olsens have been gone for years. Details of the hiring freeze at NYUNews, Sexton's full memo after the jump.

Former O.C. and current Jumper actress Rachel Bilson is complaining in Nylon about the chimp dressed as a Santa for website College Humor's last Christmas party: "Maybe I overreacted because I was too tired, but it made me so mad! All these people were drunk and taking pictures, and it was horrible!" It was a pretty white-trashy stunt, but it's hard to come up with new ways to throw money around sometimes. A December Page Six item says that Bilson actually "jumped the half-hour line" to get her picture taken with the chimp, but College Humor co-founder Ricky Van Veen says, "She didn't cut the line. She and her friend were leaving the party, so i brought them to the front of the line for a quick look. She was really nice to everybody." The chimp, who goes by the name of Louie, was unavailable for comment. Update! Louie's latest career move &mdash starring in a Human Giant comedy video &mdash after the jump! He is hilar.

Well, on the Internets, anyway! In just "five minutes a day," you can play popular world-domination game Risk, designed for Stanford University campus. "Will FloMo take over Lake Lagunita? Should Stern and Wilbur seek out an alliance? Can the Upper Row unite?" [Stanford Turf]

Despite the abundance of college sex magazines these days, it turns out that college kids are actually having less sex than in times past. The average number of partners per year for college men dropped from 2.1 in 2000 to 1.6 in 2006. And everybody overestimates how much sex everybody else is having. Alecia Oleyourrik, the editor of BU's Boink sex magazine and a co-producer of a book (misleadingly) called "College Sex by the People Having It," admits to being "the most prudish" of all her friends. She is looking for work as a waitress in New York, in case any sexless restaurants are hiring [Newsweek]. So much false advertising! Especially considering the covers [slightly NSFW] of some of Boink's past issues (except the masturbation issue, I guess):

"Students Prefer Easy Courses and 'Hot' Professors" [TaxProf Blog]

Mind thievery at Brown University! A couple of rascally student reporters at the college's daily paper stand accused of lifting material from the Yale Daily News and Harvard's Crimson. (We're assuming there's no point in cribbing from the Cornell paper.) New York Times ethicist Randy Cohen dispensed a little sage advice there in December, telling a very interested crowd that taking Adderall to keep up a GPA was basically fine. "You can't be unethical all by yourself," he said. Great-like the world needs more overly-ambitious tweaked-out fabulists. This is Brown's third incident of plagiarism in as many months, and something like the tenth at an Ivy League school in the last year. Do Ivy Leaguers stretch the truth more than their counterparts? Who are the fibbiest kid reporters in the country? After the jump, a map of collegiate plagiarism scandals from the last few years.

Remember Sean Patrick Murray, the NYU kid who made "Under the Arch," the honey-colored FelicityLagunaGossipGirls-esque reality show video about all his cool slutty druggy NYU friends? He's gonna be a star! Or something! Murray has signed on with reality TV production company MadWoodEntertainment he tells us: