This week in the District, eight tentacled snakes were born at the Smithsonian National Zoo, D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson announces an “education crisis” in the number of students with unexcused absences, and a robbery in Dupont Circle led to a car chase.

First tentacled snakes born in years at National Zoo

After four years of difficulty breeding the reptile, zookeepers at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo were surprised October 21 when eight tentacled snakes were born. The newborns will likely be sent to other zoos, as the National Zoo has four on display and few others in the country host the species, officials said.

This birth is the first time in 11 years that this species at this zoo has given birth to offspring able to survive outside the womb, according to the Washington Post.

“It could be that they were relatively young before,” keeper Matt Evans said to the Washington Post. “Even though they looked like they were pregnant this time, we weren’t expecting anything different.”

The snakes, which look like a cross between a slug and a snake, can grow up to four feet long. They are aquatic ambush hunters, officials said, and when hunting, they hold themselves under water using their tail and sense prey with their tentacles. Their venom is designed to attack prey in different ways but has not effect on humans.

“Within a few hours of being born, the snakes were already acting like adults,” Evans said in a news release. “Instincts took over and they were hunting.”

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The Georgetown University Career Center has compiled and released the data from surveys it took of graduating students of the Class of 2009. The report presents the class as a whole and then breaks it down by school. So, without further ado:

Georgetown University Class of 2009

The most immediate things apparent in the results, comprised of the responses of 60 percent of last year’s senior class, or 1024 of the 1716 graduates, won’t shock you: employment rates immediately after graduation were down—but not dismal—and so were starting salaries.

Fifty-seven percent of the Class of 2009′s respondents reported being employed post-graduation. By contrast, 62 percent of the Classes of 2006, 2007, and 2008 reported being employed post-graduation. Twelve percent of Class of 2009 respondents listed searching for employment as their primary activity after graduation, the highest percent recorded since 2004.

The average starting salary reported employed Class of 2009 graduates was $46,989, about six percent lower than the average starting salary reported by the Class of 2008.

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Every year the National Collegiate Athletics Association compiles data about graduation rates for student athletes.  In this year’s data, which looks at students who started college in 2002, Georgetown student-athletes had a graduation rate of 86 percent—well above the Division I average of 63 percent.

The graduation rate for student athletes at Georgetown is slightly lower than the overall graduation rate, 94 percent.

The report also gives graduation rates for specific sports.  Several teams had 100 percent graduation rates, including Men’s Golf and Women’s Crew, Field Hockey, Golf, Swimming and Tennis. Other teams with graduation rates above 85 percent were Men’s Baseball and Lacrosse and Women’s Lacrosse, Soccer and Volleyball.

The team with the lowest graduation rate was Men’s Basketball, which had a graduation rate of 60 percent.  The graduation rate for Georgetown’s Basketball team is still higher than the Division I average for the sport of 48 percent.

The American Enterprise Institute just released a study of graduation rates of four-year colleges, “Diplomas and Dropouts: Which Colleges Actually Graduate Their Students (And Which Don’t).” The results, which are based on the percentage of students who graduate within six years, show Georgetown in good standing, but some other D.C. schools struggling.

With a 93 percent graduation rate, Georgetown is in the upper echelon of universities, tied for 16th best overall. As you can see from the graph above, we’ve also got the highest graduation rate of schools in the District by a good 15 percentage points.

Although George Washington University has the second-highest showing in D.C., when the study’s authors subdivided the schools by selectivity, GW wasn’t looking so hot. Among “Most Competitive” schools (colleges that typically admit fewer than one third of applicants and whose students have median SAT scores between 655 and 800), GW’s 78 percent graduation rate was the second worst.