Penn in the News

At £67,750 ($103,000), the overall cost of a two-year M.B.A. at the London Business School is one of the more eye-watering price tags in British higher education. To put it into some kind of perspective, with that sum you could buy a brand-new Porsche Panamera 4 with change for fuel. But for LBS Dean Andrew Likierman, the worth of his institution’s premium degree transcends mere pounds and pence. And he is also keen to dispel any notion that LBS is a cash cow -- an accusation that has been leveled at British business schools.

Carra Cote-Ackah of the School of Social Policy & Practice’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy talks about the importance of investing in organizations that are trying to achieve a goal.

A series of racially charged incidents and student protests have roiled Ithaca College. One incident involved two alumni referring to a third, a black woman, as “the savage” at a college event after she said, “I had this savage hunger” to build a successful career. Another involved an unaffiliated fraternity that encouraged students to wear “’90s thuggish style” clothing and “bling” to a party.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center critiques a question John Harwood posed to Donald Trump during the third Republican presidential debate.

The University of Louisville apologized on Thursday after its president, James R. Ramsey, and other university officials drew sharp criticism for appearing in a photograph in stereotypical Mexican costumes, complete with sombreros, bushy mustaches, and maracas, reports The Courier-Journal, a newspaper in Louisville, Ky. The newspaper published the picture on Wednesday in a photo gallery about a university-owned mansion. The costumed officials were pictured at a Halloween party there on Wednesday. On Thursday the university’s view of the event was somewhat less festive.

Samuel Preston of the School of Arts & Sciences comments on the effects of China’s change in its one-child policy.

At £67,750 ($103,000), the overall cost of a two-year M.B.A. at the London Business School is one of the more eye-watering price tags in British higher education. To put it into some kind of perspective, with that sum you could buy a brand-new Porsche Panamera 4 with change for fuel. But for LBS Dean Andrew Likierman, the worth of his institution’s premium degree transcends mere pounds and pence. And he is also keen to dispel any notion that LBS is a cash cow -- an accusation that has been leveled at British business schools.

High-school students taking college courses for credit will be able to receive Pell Grants for the first time, under an experiment the Education Department announced on Friday. The announcement occurred just two weeks after the department unveiled another pilot that will allow federal grants and loans to flow to educational-technology companies that team up with colleges to offer coding boot camps, MOOCs, short-term certificates, and other credentials.

Research about the symbiosis of clams and algae led by Alison Sweeney of the School of Arts & Sciences is cited.

Do colleges coddle their students too much? That was the question I posed in my column last week. I suggested that the obsession colleges have with data-mining software to steer students toward specific majors and certain courses where they’re more likely to succeed is producing a generation of risk-averse graduates. But several readers reminded me that not every student is raised by helicopter parents helping them each step of the way to college.