Penn in the News

After receiving basic health insurance while working for a small consulting company, Kevin J. Reuning, a would-be graduate student, was pleased to learn about Pennsylvania State University’s generous plan. During a recruitment event, a Penn State doctoral student told him that her out-of-pocket costs for having a baby had been $75 total. But now, two years after starting his Ph.D. program in political science, his deductible has more than tripled, to $250, premiums have increased, and coverage has been reduced. Mr.

Ezekiel Emanuel of the Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School comments on physician-assisted death for terminally ill patients and the costs associated for insurers.

Tell Sgt. Dustin Young he’s not a real cop. He has broken up drunken brawls, pulled a four-foot snake out of a building, and investigated countless cases of sexual assault. A few years ago, he saw a young man walking toward tracks and an oncoming train. Sergeant Young raced up, grabbed the hood of his sweatshirt, and yanked him back just before the train roared by. It came so close that it cut the man’s ear and tore off his shoe. For 14 years, Sergeant Young has been a policeman here on Miami University’s main campus of 20,000. He has saved lives and seen some lost.

It pains this old logic professor to read university officials’ arguments against divesting their institutions of investments in fossil fuels, not because their refusal to divest is wrong-headed, although I believe it is, but because their logic is so awful. A sample of Ivy League universities’ antidivestment statements offers a primer in the fallacies that students are warned against in Logic 101.

Kate Davis and Ravinder Reddy of the Perelman School of Medicine are quoted about a new imaging technique in development to treat epilepsy patients.

Neil Fishman of the Perelman School of Medicine is quoted about how people living with HIV are treated by others.

G. Richard Shell of the Wharton School suggests ways to deal with unexpected developments during the interview process.

Margaret Spellings, a former U.S. secretary of education under George W. Bush, is a finalist in the search for a new president of the University of North Carolina system, and she will meet with the university’s Board of Governors in an emergency session on Friday, The News and Observer reports, citing unidentified sources “with direct knowledge” of the search. Ms. Spellings is the only candidate scheduled to meet with the board on Friday, the Raleigh newspaper said.

Julie Lythcott-Haims noticed a disturbing trend during her decade as a dean of freshmen at Stanford University. Incoming students were brilliant and accomplished and virtually flawless, on paper. But with each year, more of them seemed incapable of taking care of themselves. At the same time, parents were becoming more and more involved in their children’s lives. They talked to their children multiple times a day and swooped in to personally intervene whenever something difficult happened.

The dismal 21.5 percent youth turnout during the 2014 midterm elections had many pundits crowing about apathetic millennials, but presidential elections are a different story for young voters and college students, particularly in the age of Obama. Exit polls put the under-30 cohort of the electorate in 2012 at almost one in five, or 19 percent, which is one point above the rate in 2008 when young people played a decisive role in electing President Obama. For that election college students, who make up more than a third of voters under 24, turned out in droves.