The Avenue of the Arts on South Broad St is always bustling, but today it had an extra burst of energy. The students at the University of the Arts were moving back into the dorms, and the first-year students were on campus to pick up their IDs and do the usual first-day orientation go-round.

It's marvelous to watch a room full of college students and their parents. A mother came forward to introduce her daughter; a father helped his son move a TV, a bookshelf, and a box fan inside; a group of older students, awash in piercings and hair dye, smiled and hugged each other at the corner coffee shop. Policemen were directing traffic on Pine St, helping people park, making sure no 18-year-old gets crushed by a garbage truck while lugging a futon mattress. Staff young and old were bustling around, making themselves helpful, answering questions and directing people to where they needed to be.

I was there to pick up my part-time faculty ID, and to buy some old card catalogues from the library. (Disclosure: I am a nerd for card catalogues. Really for anything related to books or writing from the turn of the century.) I haven't been on college campuses much since my son was born, besides popping in and out at Penn to grab library books and pick up mail. I've been at Penn forever, so some of the shine has worn off. But the day before, I bumped into a group of twenty or so foreign-born UArts freshmen, mostly South Korean and Japanese, all eager to take their English placement tests, all excited to be our newest Philadelphians. I am continually amazed that I get to be a part of this marvelous organism called the university, an organism optimized for the production and transmission of knowledge. And I am continually delighted that education is Philadelphia's largest industry; that we live in a city that attracts young people or people of any age interested in learning and the people who want to help them learn.

UArts wasn't the only college campus I saw today. All over the city, the students are coming back. I loaded up the card catalogues and drove my rental van across the South Street bridge, through Penn's campus, then down Woodland Avenue, past the University of the Sciences, to my apartment in Cedar Park. After I dropped off the van I had to rush, taking the bus down Spruce, past Penn and Children's Hospital and HUP again to get to my CarShare car, so I could drive to my tutoring appointment in Lower Merion.

I went past Moore College and the Art Museum, down Landsdowne and Parkside Drives and wound up on Bryn Mawr Avenue in a part of Wynnefield I'd never been in before, a beautiful neighborhood that open's up into St. Joseph's. I was early, so I stopped at Wendy's. (Disclosure: I have an irresistable urge to put terrible things in my body.) Families at St. Joe's were doing the move-in drill too, and two sophomores, one skinny like a teenager, the other a little stub of a man, lined up behind me, young metabolisms ready to take anything you could throw at them. I met with my rising senior to work on his college application essays, then rushed back so my wife could get on the bus to go work at Thomas Jefferson.

So many of us work or study at Philadelphia's colleges or universities, are alumni of these schools, or live in the neighborhoods that they nourish. I have to wonder:

1) What can we do to ensure that more Philadelphians can attend college?
2) What can we do to encourage more of our college students to stay in Philadelphia?
3) What can we do to encourage more of our college students to involve themselves in the political process, at the national, state, and local levels?
4) What can we do at the level of policy to ensure that our city works to serve college students, graduate and medical students, high school students, and other younger people?

These seem to me like obvious problems that Young Philly Politics can work to address.