The acronymfinder only says Frosh = Freshman (College) . . .

http://www.acronymfinder.com/acronym.aspx?rec...
. . .

I can confirm that, in the mid to late nineties, it was in regular use. However, I never thought of it as a PC term but rather more of a degrading term. I don't know why though, maybe because of the way and the situations in which it was used?

If it indeed is, as you suspect, somehow a PC version of "freshman", it would be due to the fact that you avoid using the "man" in "freshman" when referring to a female.

I can only help with your second question how does it help us with any "un-pc-ness"

Well, because of Freshman.
Freshman and Freshwoman? Nah... Freshperson? Errmm... Frosh? Sounds plain daft to me...

Example of derogatory use of "frosh":

"One day, a lawn in the centre of campus became infested with Frosh. In an effort to beautify the campus, one of our illustrious senior classmen decided to round them up using a length of pink silk. Your job is to compute how much silk was required to complete the task." (from http://acm.uva.es/p/v101/10135.html)

Perhaps an insight into the origins of this word?

"NOUN:Inflected forms: pl. frosh
Informal A freshman, as in college.
ETYMOLOGY:Shortening and alteration of freshman (perhaps influenced by German Frosch, frog, grammar-school pupil)."

Where I teach, "frosh" is simply the short form of freshman - No PC aspect, no thought of etymology, no derogatory connotation. (Any derogatory idea comes simply from the fact that the 'upper classmen' look down on freshmen anyway, no matter what they call them.) When using the full term, female students, as well as male, call themselves "freshmen"; no one really thinks about the "man/men" part of the word, it's just a term to designate students in the ninth grade/first year of high school.

In most sports the school fields three male teams: varsity, junior varsity and frosh-soph (Frosh and soph simply being shortened forms for freshman and sophomore). The idea is that students of approximately the same playing ability compete against one another.

I was thinking the other day that my old [1958 textbook of Chinese] even had accurate drawings of the mouth when forming various sounds, and accurate descriptions of the sounds — written in the arcane language understood only by professional linguistics professor and/or people much smarter than I am. What is generally missing in those explanations is a clear explanation of how to make the sounds expressed in frosh-proof terms. And the pictures actually failed because they were anatomically correct.

(aus einem E-Mail)

Dieses Beispiel stützt vielleicht die These von hermarphromoose, dass "frosh" etwas abschätzig ist.

Ich lehre in Waterloo, Kanada und hier heisst es ausschliesslich "frosh", so wie an allen anderen Universitaeten in der Naehe. Hatte Schwierigkeit irgendein Woerterbuch zu finden, dass den Begriff enthaelt. Unter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientation_week ist mehr zu finden, allerdings sind die Quellen nicht genannt. Mir ist der Begriff fuer Erstsemestrige (wie wir in Oesterreich sagen wuerden) als auch fuer das erste Semester selbst gelaeufig.

Gregor Weihs