Penn in the News

College tuition has risen too quickly, and debt is unmanageable for increasing numbers of students; that much is clear. But to contain college prices, education leaders will need to answer a contentious question: Why does the price keep rising? Higher education's critics tend to blame high prices on overpaid professors or fancy climbing walls. At public colleges, lobbyists tend to blame reductions in state support. But a new study places the blame elsewhere: the ready availability of federal student aid.

Marybeth Gasman of the Graduate School of Education is quoted about The Center for Minority Serving Institutions launching a new program called Pathways to the Professoriate.

Universities with large endowments are once again coming under the congressional microscope. Unlike in 2007 and 2008, however, this time it’s just the private institutions — apparently the 56 whose endowments were valued in excess of $1 billion as of the 2014 fiscal year — that will face scrutiny over the "tax preferences" afforded those endowments.

Woodrow Wilson: progressive visionary or unrepentant racist? If the 28th president of the United States were all one or the other, Princeton University would have decided long ago whether to change names and monuments on campus that honor former President Wilson, a Princeton alumnus and the Ivy League school's 13th president. But the reality, historians and students agree, is that Wilson was both.

Say your campus likes to encourage students to resolve sexual-misconduct cases through mediated discussions. When a student confides in a professor that a guy took advantage of her while she was drunk and asks her not to tell anyone, the professor obliges. Clear and convincing evidence is the standard your disciplinary panel insists on before finding someone responsible for an assault. If you haven’t already heard from the U.S.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center is quoted about young supporters of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

Last month, a student newspaper published a shocking story: Reporters at the Mountain Echo wrote that Mount St. Mary’s University’s new president planned to cull 20-25 students from the freshman class deemed unlikely to succeed in the first weeks of school in order to improve the college’s retention numbers and thus its rankings.

David Rudovsky of the Law School is quoted about the overuse of Tasers.

In recent weeks, three different college campuses have seen instances of meningitis -- one which resulted in the death of a university employee -- but only one of those instances qualified as an outbreak prompting widespread vaccinations of the student body. Bacterial meningitis is a rare but dangerous infectious disease that affects the brain and spinal cord. It can cause neurological damage, necessitate amputation or lead to death in some cases.

Daniel Langleben of the Perelman School of Medicine is cited for studying ways in which neural activity can signify lying.