Penn in the News

The children of the wealthy and well-connected in China enjoy enormous privileges over their poorer counterparts: access to elite kindergartens and primary schools, expensive tutors, European vacations, flashy Italian and German sports cars and generous allowances. But in a country where cash and connections rule, one bastion of meritocracy, it was thought, remained: admission to a university. It was no myth that a high score on China’s famously difficult national college entrance examination guaranteed a spot at a top university and a ticket to the middle class, and maybe beyond.

Marybeth Gasman of the Graduate School of Education is quoted about the Maryland Higher Education Commission and the Coalition for Equity and Excellence in Maryland Higher Education having different views on historically black colleges and universities.

The American Law Institute, a scholarly group influential in legal circles, is beginning to craft guidelines on campus sexual assault that will seek to outline best practices and bring some clarity to the tangles of compliance with federal law. The institute is perhaps best known for its Model Penal Code, which is the bedrock of many states’ criminal statutes, including sexual-assault laws. A team at the institute is now revising the sexual-violence provisions of the penal code.

Free online educational courses may not be democratizing education as much as proponents believe, a new study reports. John D. Hansen, a doctoral student at Harvard University’s School of Education, and his colleagues looked at registration and completion patterns in 68 massive open online courses, or MOOCs, offered by Harvard and M.I.T. The data covered 164,198 participants aged 13 to 69. In a study published in the journal Science, Mr. Hansen and his colleagues reported that people living in more affluent neighborhoods were more likely to register and complete MOOCs.

A growing number of colleges and universities in the past few years have adopted policies requiring all faculty members and other professional employees to report sexual misconduct to designated administrators. Though not required by law, the move is an outgrowth of U.S. Department of Education guidance on preventing and investigating campus sexual assault. The guidance, issued in 2011, mandated that certain employees have an obligation to report cases of sexual assault and other sexual misconduct they become aware of.

Several colleges, prodded by black students who want to see more black professors on their campuses, have announced ambitious efforts in recent weeks to hire more faculty members from underrepresented minority groups. But even as some institutions promise to shell out millions of dollars to shift the composition of their faculties, recruitment and hiring seem to get more attention than retention does. Keeping the people who come aboard is a pressing challenge for institutions.

Stanford University encourages its students to think big and hatch ideas for new companies. But those who plan to start their own ventures are hearing a new message from the school: Wait. Worried that student founders have become so absorbed in their fledgling companies that they are missing out on course work and campus life, Stanford’s Graduate School of Business is asking M.B.A.

Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School comments on employee training during the Great Recession.

Dan Romer of the Annenberg Public Policy Center comments on the desensitization of Americans when hearing about mass shootings.

When black students at the University of Missouri at Columbia issued a list of demands in October, eight items were listed. The demands were far-reaching, including the ouster of the university system president (a protest goal that was achieved), the hiring of more black faculty members and significant expansion of efforts to promote an inclusive campus. When students at Amherst College staged a sit-in in November, they had 11 demands.