Penn in the News

Roy Hamilton of the Perelman School of Medicine is interviewed about wearable brain enhancing consumer technology.

It’s not every day that Yale University gets an offer like this: Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) invited the 315-year-old Ivy League institution to move to the Sunshine State. The Connecticut legislature has a proposal to impose a tax on some investment profits from the university’s $26.5 billion endowment, and Scott seized on the opportunity to tempt the historic New Haven school to warmer climes. “We would welcome a world-renowned university like Yale to our state and I can commit that we will not raise taxes on their endowment,” Scott announced in a news release Tuesday.

Facing severe budget cuts from the state around 2010, University of California campuses started increasing their admission of out-of-state students, who pay much higher tuition rates than do California residents. UC officials never made a secret of the strategy, and some even spoke of hoping parents of high school students would start lobbying for larger state appropriations. That didn't happen.

As the costs of graduate education skyrocket and students demand cheaper, more-convenient ways of learning, colleges and universities are increasingly experimenting with so-called "stackable degrees." Think Lego blocks of college education, letting students start with a MOOC, then add a few more MOOCs to get an online certificate, then add yet more courses to get a traditional master’s degree. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announced such a degree on Wednesday.

Laura Huang of the Wharton School is profiled for studying angel investors.

Christina Roberto of the Perelman School of Medicine comments on the amount of sugar in soda.

The first major update in seven years of a database on grade inflation has found that grades continue to rise and that A is the most common grade earned at all kinds of colleges. Since the last significant release of the survey, faculty members at Princeton University and Wellesley College, among other institutions, have debated ways to limit grade inflation, despite criticism from some students who welcome the high averages. But the new study says these efforts have not been typical.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center joins a conversation addressing the media coverage of the 2016 presidential race.

In a brightly lit classroom here at Harvard, Mia Karvonides was trying to explain to a group of bemused student leaders the difference between a romantic encounter and “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” as the university’s relatively new code of sexual misconduct defines it. She tried to leaven the legalistic atmosphere at the town-hall-style meeting with realistic-sounding examples, defying gender stereotypes. Jose and Lisa, chemistry students, are working late at night in the lab, she began, when Lisa comes up from behind and kisses Jose on the neck.

Stephanos Bibas of the Law School says, “We may not have another justice on the court for another year. If they just ditch this case, for a year you persist in having different laws in different parts of the country.”