Have you ever heard of Patrick Nicholas? How about Abhijit Mahato? Lauren Burk? Eve Carson? I hadn’t heard of them either. I’ll bet you’ve heard of Yale student Annie Le, though.

All of these people were college students, and they were all murdered. And yet, despite rarely reading or watching the news, the only name I recognized was Annie Le’s. This brings to mind a whole slew of questions. Is one college student’s death more important than another’s? Was Le’s life more valid than the other students’ lives because she attended an Ivy League school as opposed to a state university or community college? Is one tragedy more newsworthy than another?

The New York Times has already run seven news articles about Le’s murder and she has her own topic page on the Times’ Web site. If you run a search for Patrick Nicholas on The New York Times Web site, however, you’ll come up empty. There hasn’t been a single story on Nicholas yet.

So who, you may be asking, is Patrick Nicholas? Since you won’t find anything about him on The New York Times Web site and a Yahoo! search will only bring up news about a NASA employee with the same name, I’ll explain. Nicholas was a 20-year-old Kingsborough Community College sophomore who was shot in the back on Sept. 19, 2009. Here’s the kicker: Nicholas died in Brooklyn, New York.

Yale isn’t in New York, but Brooklyn is. So somehow the murder of a community college student in Brooklyn isn’t newsworthy enough to warrant a mention in The New York Times, but a college student murdered at Yale is. Oh and it’s not even about race. Neither Nicholas nor Le was white.

By the way, Eve Carson was killed in Chapel Hill while Abhijit Mahato was slain at Duke, and they were killed by the same 17-year-old individual. Lauren Burk was murdered the day before Eve Carson. Why did I know about more about the murder of a college student in Connecticut than I did about three others that took place in North Carolina?

What, then, is the explanation for the unequal news coverage of the murders? I must lean towards money. Le was an Ivy League graduate student. The others simply weren’t. Money buys power and prestige. And since Yale is an Ivy League school, you have to be the best of the best to attend. You oftentimes need to have money to go since the degree of education is top-notch. On the other hand, community colleges and state universities are less competitive and less expensive to attend.

Here’s what the disconnect boils down to: Le, Mahato, Carson, Burke, and Nicholas were all students who were bettering themselves by furthering their education.

“Had the Le murder happened at, say, Oklahoma State University, you’d have to bribe the night editor of The New York Times with a case of scotch and Hasty Pudding tickets to get him to run a one-inch wire story,” said Jack Shafer of Slate.com. “Hell, a Stanford murder wouldn’t warrant this sort of coverage! All murders are equal; it’s just that press treats Harvard and Yale murders as more equal.”

It seems that as a college student, if you’re going to get murdered, have the sense to be attending an Ivy League school if you want anyone to hear about it. And in the meantime, read alternative and local news sources to find out if any of your non-Ivy League affiliated friends and neighbors have been murdered.