Penn in the News

After two years of healthy growth, colleges' endowment investment return rates fell in 2015. While they didn't come close to the declines of some years in the past decade, the average rate is the lowest reported since 2012. On average, colleges had 2.4 percent returns for the 2015 fiscal year, according to an annual survey by Commonfund and the National Association of College and University Business Officers. The survey includes data from 812 U.S. colleges and universities. That’s considerably lower than the past two years, when returns hit the double digits.

Debate continues to boil in Texas over a new law allowing concealed weapons across college campuses. This week a prominent physicist at the flagship University of Texas at Austin said he would seek to bar guns in his classroom even after the law takes effect in August. “I will put it into my syllabus that the class is not open to students carrying guns,” Steven Weinberg, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1979, was quoted as saying in the Austin American-Statesman. “I may wind up in court.

Carrie Kovarik of the Perelman School of Medicine comments on teledermatology and encourages follow-up care.

Doctoral candidate Junhow Wei of the School of Arts & Sciences is highlighted for studying how people who audition for “American Idol” cope with not being selected to become contestants on the show.

Mortimer Zuckerman, the media and real estate mogul, says he got the idea for his new $100 million science scholarship program at 5 o’clock one morning last summer when he couldn’t sleep.

Duke suspended all sorority activities until further notice Wednesday after concerns about this season’s rush and bid events and a new sorority member who was hospitalized for alcohol-related problems, then eased the suspension after a meeting with sorority leaders. A spokesperson for the elite private university in North Carolina said the president of the panhellenic council and dean of students would not be available to discuss the situation until after the meeting with chapter presidents and the panhellenic executive board.

College endowments may have grown last year by the smallest amount since 2012, as reported elsewhere on this site today, but institutions got some good financial news in the 2015 fiscal year: charitable contributions to colleges and universities rose to a record level, $40.3 billion, the Council for Aid to Education reports in its annual Voluntary Support of Education survey. Even so, a small and exclusive coterie of institutions is disproportionately benefiting from donors' largesse.

Rexford Ahima of the Perelman School of Medicine is quoted about body mass index.

Karl Ulrich of the Wharton School pens an op-ed on the importance of merging the entrepreneurial journey with a strong curriculum.

Angela Duckworth of the School of Arts & Sciences is mentioned for her research and definition of “grit.”