College Clips
Published Feb. 20, 2007
Indiana student flags down police car for ride
Jordan Howard, an Indiana University student, thought he was ready to end his Wednesday evening bar visit when he took to the streets to flag down a ride home. He instead flagged down Indiana University Police Department officer Brian Oliger. According to IUPD Sgt. Craig Munroe, Oliger spotted Howard early Thursday morning stumbling in the streets.
"As he got closer, the man faced him, raised his arms above his head and then went to the sidewalk," Munroe said.
Howard told Oliger he needed a ride home, slurred his speech and displayed difficulty standing. Howard then said he had come from a bar, and when Oliger inspected his identification, he saw that Howard was only 20 years old.
According to the report, Howard failed a standard field sobriety test and was placed under arrest for illegal possession/consumption. He was taken to the county jail.
— The Indiana Daily Student (Indiana University)
Potential partners aren't who they say, Cornell study finds
Scared of finding love online? You should be, according to a Cornell University study. The study by communication and information science professor Jeffrey Hancock and graduate student Catalina Toma lays out the truths and misconceptions about online dating.
Toma and Hancock compared the actual weights, heights and ages from online dating participants' driver's licenses to how they describe themselves online. It took nearly six months to recruit 80 participants who used the Web sites Match.com, Yahoo! Personals, American Singles and webdate in the New York City area.
Toma then had to persuade participants to get on a scale and take part in a two-hour meeting. She and Hancock found that 52.6 percent of men and 39 percent of women lied about their height. In terms of weight, 64.1 percent of women and 60.5 percent of men altered reality for the virtual dating scene. Age was less of an issue with 24.3 percent of the men and 13.1 percent of the women providing incorrect information.
— The Cornell Daily Sun (Cornell University)
Women outperforming men at Kansas
According to university data, women at the University of Kansas are graduating faster and with higher grade point averages than men. Women's GPAs have been about .2 grade points higher than men's since 1996, and the percentage of women graduating in four, five and six years has exceeded that of men since 1985.
Education professor Lisa Wolf-Wendel said women in general are more likely to graduate from high school, go to college and graduate with higher GPAs than men.
She said women were the majority of students in almost every academic area except mathematics, engineering and the physical sciences. Some American universities had female student populations near 70 percent.
Wolf-Wendel said she didn't know exactly why women are outperforming men. She said some have argued that K-12 education was not conducive for men because the teachers were women.
— The University Daily Kansan (University of Kansas)