Penn in the News

The nation’s medical schools chalked up another record-setting year of applications and enrollment, while making strides to attract a more-diverse applicant pool, according to figures released on Thursday by the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Gary Clinton of the Law School discusses the hanging of a plaque to honor a pioneering student from the 1920s.

Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School talks about how the cost of college and its sticker price.

When Jon H. Oberg was a researcher at the Department of Education 13 years ago, he discovered a loophole that let student loan companies reap hundreds of millions of dollars in excessive payments from the government. His catch ultimately led to a whistle-blower lawsuit accusing several lenders of defrauding taxpayers. Some settled early on. Others had their cases dismissed as recent as January, giving the impression that the years of court battles were over. Not quite.

Educators at Pennsylvania State University are getting some help writing textbooks these days. From robots. Don’t laugh. The venture saved students in faculty member Bart Pursel’s Information, People and Technology class $16,000. Pursel used the new technology, BBookX, to build a textbook, and he distributed it to students for free, the university said in a press release. “Penn State develops new technology to create robot-written textbooks,” so touts the news release. “The system is helping to usher in a new genre of media: the bionic book.”

Federal education officials have launched an investigation into how the University of Mary Washington handled threats made against feminist students on the messaging app Yik Yak. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is probing whether the university administration subjected students to a hostile environment by failing to properly respond to sexual harassment on social media, according to a letter provided Wednesday by an attorney for the students.

James Alwine and Erle Robertson of the Perelman School of Medicine discuss their research that identified an association between microbial signatures and triple negative breast cancer.

Williams College students invited Suzanne Venker, a writer and longtime critic of feminism, to speak Tuesday night, but changed their minds and took back the invite for her talk, "One Step Forward, Ten Steps Back: Why Feminism Fails." Venker had been invited to participate in a student-run, alumni-funded speaking series at Williams called "Uncomfortable Learning." The program’s purpose is to expose students to controversial voices and opinions they might not otherwise hear. Many of the speakers tend to be conservative or people whose views don't square with those of most students.

Michael Perlis of the Perelman School of Medicine is quoted about CBT-I, cognitive behavioral therapy specifically for insomnia.

Some students at American University got so fed up with the racist comments they were reading on social media that they decided to spread them. They launched an online campaign, #TheRealAU, to blast out the racism they see, in hopes it will make it more difficult to ignore. They have been posting and sharing screenshots of slurs. They plastered them on the school’s front gates. And they are demanding that the administration do something. “It has been getting worse,” said Daniel Marks, a senior from Atlanta.