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[hegemony]

For a short story, Frederick Busch's "Ralph the Duck."  It's about a guy serving as a college security guard as he gets his degree, a distraught underclasswoman, a smug professor, and a bedtime story loved by a small girl who is no longer alive.  It will bring tears to your eyes.  In my experience students love it because they can see through the smug professor and identify with both the underclasswoman and the security guard.  It was in the Year's Best some years back.  Busch expanded it into the novel Girls, which I have not read, but I regard expanded short stories with the same suspicion as I regard movie adaptations.  Anyway, I highly recommend "Ralph the Duck," though I notice it's been assigned enough that plagiarizable papers about it are floating around the internet.

[dr_alcott]

Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs, centering on a female first-year student at a college/university in Wisconsin. Beautifully written too.

Second to Prep and especially Special Topics in Calamity Physics, both set in boarding schools.

[aliasme]

Neal Stephenson, The Big U

[liquidambar]

I'm late to the thread, but what the heck...

There's an essay by Thurber about college.  I think it's called "University Days."  It's very humorous and was the only thing worth reading in my freshman English anthology.  It's supposed to be non-fiction, though.

[ega110]

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood spends much of it's story on examining college life in the near future. It's depiction of the future of humanities education is at once hilarious and depressing.

[gcaye]

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce

[galactic_hedgehog]

Sarah Bird's Alamo House is hilarious.  A friend and I discovered it in a pensione in Italy when we were college students.  Our copy was passed amongst our friends when we returned and we scoured used bookstores for copies for years afterwards.  I believe our (original) edition was subtitled "Women without men, men without brains."