Penn in the News

Last spring, Brent W. Sembler saw an opening that might help him land a big gift. As he had done many times before, the Florida State University trustee sent a query to Janice V. Finney, longtime director of admissions. Was this student, who had been denied in December, perhaps "admissible?" Mr. Sembler asked. "Here’s why I’m asking," the trustee wrote in an email. The student’s "family is capable of funding our new Business School!" With a core grade-point average below 3.0, Ms. Finney said, fall admission was not possible.

In the coming weeks, students will participate in a ritual as familiar as it is reviled: evaluating their instructors. One of the latest and most visible critiques of these assessments came this year from Carl E. Wieman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. He cast doubt on their validity and reliability, proposing that instead, professors complete an inventory of the research-based teaching practices they use. That would be more likely to promote learning than garden-variety evaluations do, Mr.

Strategies for effective giving from the Wharton School’s Adam Grant’s book Give and Take.

Hundreds of students crammed into Amherst College’s Robert Frost Library for a sit-in against racial injustice that turned into a confessional, as one black or Hispanic student after another rose to talk about feelings of alienation and invisibility on campus. In the heat of the moment, the students drafted a list of demands for the administration. They wanted the college to stop calling its athletes the Lord Jeffs, after Lord Jeffery Amherst, the pre-Revolutionary War British commander who advocated germ warfare against Native Americans and for whom this college town was named.

Research that finds the benefits of a “switchback” approach for technology entrepreneurs co-authored by David Hsu of the Wharton School is highlighted.

The American student loan crisis is often seen as a problem of profligacy and predation. Wasteful colleges raise tuition every year, we are told, even as middle-class wages stagnate and unscrupulous for-profit colleges bilk the unwary. The result is mounting unmanageable debt. There is much truth in this diagnosis. But it does not explain the plight of Liz Kelley, a Missouri high school teacher and mother of four who made a series of unremarkable decisions about college and borrowing. She now owes the federal government $410,000, and counting. This is a staggering and unusual sum.

Since 2008, student aid from federal and institutional sources has increased. Political and foundation leaders have also focused on the importance of a postsecondary education, and the need to increase college attainment. But in the years since 2008, the proportion of low-income recent high school graduates who enroll in college has seen a significant drop, according to a new analysis from the American Council on Education. In 2008, 55.9 percent of such high school graduates enrolled in college. By 2013, that figure dropped to 45.5 percent.

Sari Feldman, president of the American Library Association, sees a coming transformation of academic libraries thanks to technology. She says they are taking on greater roles in creating teaching materials and scholarship — and preserving tweets as well as books.

Is a high discount rate a guaranteed trouble sign for colleges? Not necessarily, experts say -- sometimes colleges can leverage discounts to increase revenue, at least if they are increasing enrollment. But maintaining very high discount rates can be a risky strategy and an indicator a college is in distress. The average discount rate offered by colleges to first-year students has risen significantly in recent years.

The statistic was shocking: Nine out of 10 colleges reported no rapes on their campuses in 2014. That finding, released on Monday by the American Association of University Women, seemed to contradict recent surveys of female undergraduates, as well as an oft-cited — and controversial — statistic that one in five women are sexually assaulted during their time in college. Advocates and researchers agreed something was amiss. But what do the low rates of rape reports — drawn from the campus-crime-reporting law known as the Clery Act — really mean? Here are three possibilities: