Virginia Tech, founded in 1872, is famed for its college American football team and the excellence of an engineering programme that has attracted students from as far away as India and China, who are willing to pay fees of $17,406 (£9,000) a year.

It stands in the town of Blacksburg in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western Virginia.

A four-hour drive west from Washington, the town is dominated by the 2,600-acre campus of Virginia Tech, where the 26,370 students are known as “Hokies”, a nickname that originated in the 1890s from a sports chant. It replaced the previous name given to the athletic teams of “Fighting Gobblers” but the university mascot retains a turkey-like image of the Hokie Bird.

Ryan Gold, a recent graduate, said yesterday: “We’re now going to be forever associated with this horrible thing that has happened. I guess a lot of people will be discouraged from going to school there.”

The campus is usually a quiet place. “There are no metal detectors or searches or curfews,” Mr Gold said. “There is no sense of danger. I never bothered to lock my apartment — you feel very safe.”

The only trouble came from outside last August when an escaped jail inmate killed a hospital guard and fled to the campus. A sheriff’s deputy was killed and the gunman, William Morva, faces the death penalty.

In recent weeks there had been two bomb threats. The first was directed at Torgersen Hall, which is an engineering building. The second, last week, was directed at multiple engineering buildings. Students and staff were evacuated, and the university offered a $5,000 reward for information.

Most of the students are men and about 70 per cent are white.

In recent years, however, the university has attracted a significant proportion of applicants from overseas, with international students numbering about 2,000.

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