Penn in the News

President Amy Gutmann is quoted about the announcement of the commencement speaker, Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Postdoctoral fellow Jennifer Wilson of the School of Arts & Sciences writes about the history of Tolstoy College.

The Obama administration wants to expand the federal Pell Grant program by bringing back year-round eligibility for the grants, which was eliminated four years ago, and by creating a $300 annual bonus for Pell recipients who take at least 15 credits per semester. The two proposed changes announced today would cost $2 billion in the next fiscal year, the U.S. Department of Education said. Both would require approval by the Republican-led U.S. Congress, which will be a tall order for the White House.

Dennis Culhane of the School of Social Policy & Practice and John Fantuzzo of the Graduate School of Education are interviewed about starting the Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy Center.

Zhao Yang, 18, a high school student in Beijing, looked upset as she emerged from a room equipped with a video camera. “I was too nervous, so I spoke too fast,” she told her parents. “The questions were too weird. I wasn’t prepared for most of them.” Ms. Zhao is a top student with ambitions to go to a top American university. She has been preparing for years, working with a private admissions agent and taking the SAT and the Test of English as a Foreign Language several times. Her parents have invested more than $30,000 in the project, hoping to give their only child a boost.

Only 14 percent of the students who start out in a community college transfer to a four-year university and earn a bachelor’s degree within six years, according to a report released on Tuesday by three groups that are studying ways to plug the leaky pipeline between two- and four-year colleges. The report was a joint effort of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, the Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program, and the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The research breaks down how students fare in different states.

Ezekiel Emanuel of the Wharton School and the Perelman School of Medicine and Justin Bekelman, also of Medicine, co-author an op-ed about the cost of end-of-life care in America compared to Europe and Canada.

Harald Schmidt of the Perelman School of Medicine writes about employers and health plans offering incentives to women to get frequent mammograms.

Marybeth Gasman of the Graduate School of Education shares her thoughts on the debate on whether or not President Obama disappointed historically black colleges and universities.

Most efforts to increase the number of black and other underrepresented minority doctoral recipients in science and engineering have fallen flat. For example, the share of engineering doctorates earned by black students remained unchanged, at 4 percent, from 2004 to 2014, according to the most recent Survey of Earned Doctorates. The problem has many causes — including that most minority-group members enroll in graduate programs at lower rates than white students do — but many observers say a lack of good mentoring is a key factor.