I guess that’s one way to pay for college. Frankly, the most surprising aspect of the story is that the student says she’s a Republican.

Katie Fernelius of the Duke Chronicle reports.

Portrait of a porn star

*Editor’s note: The sources’ names in this story were changed to protect their identities. The stage name of the first-year porn star was also changed so that it could not be traced back to her true identity.

How fast is the Internet? In the United States, information travels at about 8 megabytes per second. An email is sent in the span of 0.2 seconds on average, faster than the blink of an eye. A text message is even faster. That’s the speed between “send” and “sent,” between almost and permanent—because as parents, teachers, potential employers and public service announcements have warned us, the Internet is forever.

For a first-year woman at Duke, a half-second Google search transformed her from Lauren*, a college Republican and aspiring lawyer, into Aurora*, a rising porn starlet.

But, in the lyrics of the Tony-winning musical Avenue Q, a more appropriate mantra for cyberspace has also emerged: the Internet is for porn. With an estimated 450 million visitors each month, porn sites account for 30 percent of all data transferred across the Internet. Accordingly, it comes as no surprise that the pornography industry generates more than $13.3 billion in revenue in the U.S. alone. In both China and South Korea, the amount of money generated by the porn industry is twice as large.

At a private, top-10 university like Duke where the full cost of attendance is steadily creeping to $60,000 a year, Lauren said she turns to the adult film industry to help supplement her financial aid.