Penn in the News

Marybeth Gasman of the Graduate School of Education comments on the performance funding models and historically black colleges and universities.

Graduate student unions on a number of private campuses have for years sought recognition from their universities and federal officials, to little avail. But organizing efforts at Cornell University are moving forward, in the form of an agreement on how to proceed until and if a legal barrier to collective bargaining is reversed.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center talks about politics and the current presidential campaign.

Northeastern University alumni facing the daunting challenge of paying off student loans were offered a chance at debt relief from the school on Wednesday—for the small price of some more money. “Summer’s on us! Make a gift of any size to Northeastern by June 30, and you will be eligible to win $1,000 worth of student loan repayments,” the school wrote in an email to alumni. Asking alumni who have their own debt to pay to enter a debt lottery struck some as unseemly.

New Jersey's third-largest public university broke public bidding laws when it purchased a custom conference table shipped from China that ultimately cost nearly a quarter-million dollars, the state comptroller said in a report Wednesday. Officials at Kean University in Union County authorized a Chinese manufacturer to build and ship the 22-person, state-of-the-art table before obtaining approval from the school's board of trustees, according to the comptroller's 19-month investigation. Comptroller Philip James Degnan did not refer the matter to the Attorney General's Office.

Reagan Wetherill and Teresa Franklin of the Perelman School of Medicine are featured for a study that revealed specific weeks of a woman’s menstrual cycle may be better than others for quitting smoking.

The Rhodes Trust announced on Wednesday the largest expansion of the Rhodes scholarship program in its 113-year history. The trust will open the program, which finances graduate study at the University of Oxford, to students from Ghana, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Nigeria, the Palestinian territories, Syria and the United Arab Emirates. “Our goal is to be completely a global scholarship,” Charles Conn, the warden of Rhodes House and the chief executive of the Rhodes Trust, said in a telephone interview. “There’s never been an increase like this before.”

Benjamin Abella of the Perelman School of Medicine talks about CPR training becoming a high school requirement.

It’s graduation season at high schools and colleges around the country, the time of year when students are honored for their accomplishments from the classrooms to the athletic fields. Teachers and counselors have long encouraged students to be “well-rounded.” But the problem with well-rounded students is that they usually don’t focus on any one thing for a prolonged period of time. Too often they seem to participate in activities just to check off a series of boxes, instead of showing the deep and sustained involvement, passion, and dedication that employers seek.

Sixty percent of prospective international students say they would be less likely to study at an American college if Donald J. Trump was elected president. By comparison, only about 4 percent of the potential students indicate they would steer clear of the United States if Hillary Clinton became the 45th president, while 5 percent said the same of her Democratic rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.