President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were reelected on Tuesday night, and hundreds of Hoyas ran to the White House to express their support. Both Leavey’s Sellinger Lounge and The Tombs were packed with Georgetown students watching the election count on CNN, cheering for Obama as he won state after state.

Students gathered at the front gates around midnight to run to the White House in large batches.

“Running to the White House for me was a way of celebrating a hard fought victory, acknowledging the opportunity we have as a democracy to fairly chose our leaders, and envision an improved America,” Mauricio Serna (SFS ’13) wrote in an email to Vox. “It was also a way of participating in what makes Georgetown such as a special place. Hundreds of Hoyas ran in groups, with buses, cabs and other drivers honking as we ran while chanting ‘four more years.’ At the White House, it felt as if half our  campus was there,  and chants of Hoya Saxa also broke out.”

Serna ran with a group of 10 students who started out watching the election at The Tombs.

Tuesday evening, almost 75 to 100 Georgetown students stood in line at Duke Ellington High School to engage in same-day registration. Ballots were shoved into an inconspicuous cardboard box, with lines circling around the high school hallways until 9 p.m. Not expecting so many students to show up for same-day registration, the voting personel were not equipped with enough same-day special ballots, further delaying the process. Students waited close to four hours before they were able to vote.

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At 10:24 this morning, the University sent an email to all students indicating that it will be closed on Tuesday, October 30 due to the extreme weather being caused by Hurricane Sandy/Frankenstorm. This is the second consecutive day of cancelled classes due to the weather. The University also sent an email stating that, rest assured, “FOOD ON CAMPUS FOR MONDAY” will be comprised of plenty of Grab n’ Go meals to go around. Vital Vittles and Uncommon Grounds are currently open, and Hoya Snaxa will open at noon. Epicurean and Starbucks are also currently open.

We at Vox suggest staying indoor, keeping away from windows, having your flashlights handy, building a fort out of sheets, drinking lots of  hurricane cocktails, filling plastic bags with water and putting them in the freezer, breaking out that game of Apples to Apples that every college student has on hand, staying out of your basement in case it floods, hoarding food from Leo’s, and completely ignoring all the work you should be catching up on.

Photo by “Mean Girls in the Tardis”

UPDATE (10:00 a.m.): Lauinger Library will close at noon on Monday. Leo’s will close around 3 p.m., with plans to ration certain food items for take out. More on this soon.

According to University spokeswoman Stacy Kerr, campus is closed on Monday in anticipation of the inclement storm, Hurricane Sandy, which is expected to hit Washington D.C. at 1 p.m. Monday afternoon. The Weather Channel predicts the forecast for the next 24 hours to be in the low 50s, with a high chance of precipitation. In the afternoon, the city is likely to experience squalls, heavy rain, and winds up to 60 miles per hour.

Voxy Gurl recommends the essentials: a bottle of wine, your favorite blanket, and a movie to keep you occupied while Sandy has her way with the world. Put all your cereal in the freezer, and your meats in the microwave. Immediately.

Update: The Federal government, D.C. government, trains, planes, buses, and entire Metro service cancels for all day Monday via DCist

Tomorrow afternoon from 2 to 7 p.m., Georgetown will play host to an independently-organized TedX event. Here is a list of the speakers with brief descriptions on their background. To read more about the event, check out the news article from the Georgetown Voice.

Session 1 – 2:00pm

• Ann Pendleton-Julian is an architect, educator, writer of international standing, and Director of the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University. Her design work negotiates the overlap between architecture, landscape, culture, and technology and is motivated towards internationalism as both a concept and a reality.

• Kendall Ciesemier, a student speaker, will give a talk titled “Finding Power in Powerlessness.”

• Bobby Ghosh is a journalist and  Editor-At-Large for TIME magazine. He was TIME’s Baghdad bureau chief, and one of the longest-serving correspondents in Iraq. His Baghdad journalism has included profiles of suicide bombers and other terrorists, stories about extraordinary Iraqis and also political figures. Will give a talk titled ‘Why the Jihad is Over.’

• Tai Murray is an award winning violinist; she won an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2004. She was also a BBC New Generation Artist from 2008 through 2010. Will be giving talk titled ‘Music in the Mirror.’

Session 2 – 3:30pm

• Andrew Yang is the Founder and President of Venture for America, a fellowship program that places top college graduates in start-ups for 2 years in low-cost U.S. cities to generate job growth and train the next generation of entrepreneurs. Read the rest of this entry »

From 3:00 to 3:30 p.m. today, a group of six students held firm ground in Red Square. “Georgetown is Institutionally Racist,” one of their signs read. Another sign listed the percentages of students on campus of different races, followed by the phrase “≠ Diversity.”

These students are part of a new independent group on campus, GLUE, or Georgetown Leaders for Unity and Equity. With six board members and about 15 to 20 students in attendance at weekly meetings, GLUE plans to hold discussions every Thursday on race, diversity, and gender at Georgetown. The group will congregate in Red Square tomorrow and Thursday between 2:30 and 3:30 p.m. to inform people on this Thursday’s dialogue over the question: Is Georgetown institutionally racist?

A GLUE member in Red Square, Caroline Rosenfield (COL, ’14), said the group was founded last year by seniors. The group participated in a campaign in Red Square to protest the killing of Trayvon Martin and attended a rally in D.C. with GU Occupy and Georgetown’s chapter of the NAACP. “The discussion this week is whether or not [Georgetown] promotes segregation through the systems and institutions that it lays out for students coming to Georgetown,” Rosenfield said. ”Even within our group, there is back and forth about it.”

Rosenfield cited “Hoya Saxa Weekend” as a primary debate among members of GLUE. Hoya Saxa Weekend is an event hosted by the Center for Multicultural Equity and Access, run parallel to GAAP weekend and exclusively for students of color. “I’m not sure how many students they take each year but it’s not all students of color,” she said. “It’s not clear how they make these decisions but there are groups of students of color who are excluded from it…there are people who identify as black or are members of the black community who weren’t invited to the Hoya Saxa experience.”

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Tired of rankings yet? Georgetown, after failing to break the top 20 in U.S. News rankings yet again, (Go convince Charles Deacon that the CommonApp is not the devil and ask our donors to give a couple billion more to the school) receives another round of beating from the Chronicle of Higher Education’s data. The Chronicle released a study showing how universities view one another, using data submitted by over 1,500 colleges to the U.S Department of Education.

Georgetown now ranks as 63^rd out of 1,595 schools (behind University of Florida), according to their PageRank algorithm. In their interactive pictograph [pictured right], Georgetown selected ten peer colleges; five of which are Ivy League schools. Sadly, our university was jilted by all but three of the schools they selected as peers, although two matches were Ivy Leagues (Dartmouth and Brown). Some schools, like Bowdoin College, selected almost 100 colleges as peers.

Duke and Columbia University did not select any institution as a peer.

On the bright side, we at least have some suitors (24, in fact). Every major Jesuit school chose us as a peer, along with American University and George Washington University. Furthermore, the eight Ivy League schools only picked 12 schools outside their ranks as peers, and Georgetown was one of them, in the company of Stanford, University of Chicago, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We also got some love from Emory (who somehow managed to beat us for the vaunted 20^th place in U.S. News). Seriously, be nicer to Robert Morse, he lives on top of Baked and Wired.

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In a recent Atlantic article titled “Why College Isn’t a Bubble”, featuring Georgetown’s campus and professor Stephen Rose of the Center on Education and the Workforce, a strong argument favors the idea that a college degree results in more than just piles of student debt and unemployment. Front-and-center on the online article was a picture of Georgetown’s Healy Hall [pictured right]. The article discusses why the concept of the “college bubble,” where students bulk up loans to a dismal job market, is not necessarily a fair depiction of a college degree’s worth.

Jordan Weissmann, associate editor of the Atlantic and author of the article, argues that the current university system is, while not perfect, functioning well enough, and that many of the rumors about the bubble are untrue. Tuition is not soaring as much as many complain, the job market is not that bleak, and, apparently, students are still learning, according to Weissman.

Rose contributes to the article, dispelling the idea that graduates end up in jobs below their skill level. This “over-qualification problem” is, according to Rose, “easily exaggerated.” The over qualification idea is that college graduates pay for expensive college degrees, only to end up in coffee shops or as bartenders. Rose argues that the way the Federal Bureau for Labor Statistics qualifies jobs is out of date. For example, according to the BLS, insurance agents do not require a bachelor’s degree. While this may have been true 50 years ago, in today’s job market insurance agents are at a significant financial advantage holding anything higher than a high school diploma.

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Today, U.S. News & World Report released its list of college rankings, with Georgetown University as 21st out of National Universities. We’ve seen 22nd place last year, we’ve even gone so far as 23rd in years past. It’s good to be back.

Emory University beat us to the punch, scoring 20th place. BUT WHY? We’ll just stick with tradition and blame it on the author of U.S. News, Robert Morse, who lives directly above Baked and Wired. The minority of hipster Hoyas who frequent this coffee shop probably give our campus a bad rep.

In worse college ranking news, Forbes gave Georgetown an overall placement of 38. Princeton Review recently ranked our students second most politically active among college campuses. The Hilltop scores first place for Princeton Review’s category “College City Gets High Marks,” even though apparently 90 percent of us are supposed to be on campus most of the time and “houses are shaking” when we try to use GUTS buses to leave.

Georgetown administrators and officials are in the process of negotiating a partnership with the development firm Forest City Washington to determine the location and scope of the University’s campus expansion. Administrators hope that the partnership will allow Georgetown to continue growing and developing as a university in the coming years.

“We need to step back and think in a long term way to have the maximum best foot print for students and faculty,” Chris Augostini, Georgetown’s Chief Operating Officer, said. “We needed a really sophisticated organization to help us organize this.”

After interviewing different development firms in the District area, the University selected Forest City. The decision was based on Forest City’s previous successes in the D.C. metro area, such as revitalizing the Navy Yard area. Forest City has also developed projects with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and the University of Pennsylvania.

“I think they came to us for our market knowledge,” Gary McManus of Forest City Washington said.

Administrators want to make the best use of the current space that Georgetown is occupying. Partnering with Forest City will allow them to plan for expansion and change in the most effective way.

“What they’re really doing is providing us a depth of service around planning,” Augostini said. “[We’re] asking them to give us good robust options to consider and then tell us what are the implications for those options.”

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In a study released yesterday by the Georgetown University Center for Education and the Workforce, researchers show that students with college degrees are excelling in the current job market. The report reveals that half of the jobs lost since December 2007 have been recovered. Since the economic recession, approximately 2.2. million of these recovered jobs came from students with post-secondary degrees. Additionally, workers with college degrees are shown to consistently receive higher wages (almost more than 30 percent) than those with merely a high school diploma.

“It is a tough job market for college graduates but far worse for those without a college education,” said Anthony P. Carnevale, the Center’s director and co-author of the report, said in the press release. “At a time when more and more people are debating the value of postsecondary education, this data shows that your chances of being unemployed increase dramatically without a college degree.”

The study states that seven percent of college graduates are unemployed and 14 percent are employed in jobs below their skill level. The unemployment rate for recent high school graduates is approximately 24 percent.

Male college enrollment also increased since 2006, surpassing that of female enrollment.

The study appeared today on National Public Radio’s show “All Things Considered.” Carnevale spoke on the show about the importance of the study. “The only thing that’s more expensive than going to college is not going to college,” Carnevale said on the show. “You really don’t have a choice.”

Of the job-creating industries, the healthcare industry took the lead by adding over one million jobs for people with post-graduate degrees, followed by professional and business services with 750,000 jobs. Government jobs, on the other hand, have lost 14,000 college jobs since January 2010.

Last year, the Center for Education and the Workforce released a study on the value of college degrees with a major-by-major breakdown. The study largely revealed that degrees in Education can garner lifetime advantages as low as $240,000 while those in Engineering can be as high as $1,000,000.

Photo by Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce