Enrollment at Virginia Tech will be strong and steady this fall even after the shootings that killed 33 people on April 16 made international headlines. From the Roanoke Times:

Tech received deposits from 5,215 students planning to enroll as freshmen this fall. That’s up from 5,185 last year. The school has a target of 5,000 students after the first week of classes. Last year’s initial group dropped to 5,084 by that time last year.

The shootings occurred in the middle of April — the month when students decide whether or not to accept offers from schools. But the university received enough acceptance notices to not offer admission to any of the 1,441 students on its waiting list.

It remains to be seen whether new student applications at Virginia Tech might go down for next year — those students who accepted spots at the university for this fall applied between October and December of 2006, long before the shootings. But the school reported that only seven admitted students cited the shootings as a reason for not enrolling this fall — that seems like a pretty strong indication that the Virginia Tech community, despite the long road ahead of it in terms of healing, will recover from this tragedy intact.

In other Virginia Tech news, a controversial amateur video game based on Cho Seung-hui’s killing spree has been taken offline. The game’s designer, 21-year-old Australian Ryan Lambourn, wins the top prize for poor taste after posting the game on the game sharing site Newgrounds.com and then demanding “donations” on his own Web site in exchange for the game’s removal.