Penn in the News

Vice President Marie Witt of Business Services is quoted about Amazon opening a new pickup location on campus.

Late-night infomercials aren’t the only venue where companies try to lure consumers with money-back guarantees. Now some upstart online-education providers are making the same promise. Udacity, a Silicon Valley-backed provider of MOOCs, announced on Wednesday a new program that guarantees its graduates will land a job in their field within six months of completing the program — or their money back. But there are plenty of caveats.

U.S. Representative Jackie Speier, a California Democrat, is no stranger to women’s issues and has previously advocated for more accountability for colleges and universities concerning campus sexual assaults. So it was perhaps unsurprising that she weighed in on a matter of increasingly public concern -- that of sexism in science and, in particular, some institutions’ tendency to quietly allow professors who sexually harass students to move on to other institutions.

Kenneth Shropshire of the Wharton School talks about the St. Louis Rams moving to Los Angeles.

A federal judge said Tuesday that a young woman who was the central figure in a sensational Rolling Stone story of a gang rape at the University of Virginia will have to turn over documents related to the retracted article as part of a pending defamation lawsuit. U.S. District Court Chief Judge Glen E. Conrad said in court that he plans to grant most aspects of a motion from lawyers for U-Va. associate dean Nicole Eramo, who is suing Rolling Stone for its depiction of her in a 2014 article about rape at the campus here. The story focused on allegations that a U-Va.

The nation’s name-brand colleges have made virtually no progress in admitting more low-income students over the last decade, according to the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, which is calling for a “poverty preference” in college admissions. In 2013 Pell Grant recipients accounted for 17 percent of first-time, full-time students at the 193 institutions with the most competitive admissions, according to the foundation, which crunched federal data for a newly released report. That was up one percentage point from 16 percent in 2000.

Katherine Milkman of the Wharton School is cited for researching how “temporal landmarks” can spark goal-directed activities.

Graduate students Josh Bevan, Sonja Lengel and Joseph Mester of the School of Design submit a case study as a part of a course taught by Chao Guo of the School of Social Policy & Practice.

Philip Tetlock of the Wharton School and the School of Arts & Sciences is mentioned for his involvement in a project called Good Judgment.

When New York University’s teaching assistants gained the right to collective bargaining 16 years ago, they became the first graduate students at a private institution to do so. Soon, others followed suit. But the students unions were short-lived. Opposed to student labor organization, administrators from four schools including Brown appealed to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The Bush-appointed board members ultimately ruled in their favor – that students aren’t actually workers, thus revoking their collective bargaining rights.