Penn in the News

Richard Ingersoll of the Graduate School of Education and the School of Arts & Sciences is cited for suggesting that the more comprehensive a mentoring program is the more likely a teacher is prone to stay at a school.

During her senior year at Yale University, Andrea faced spiraling depression and anxiety. She sought treatment at the campus health center, where she received medication and therapy.

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.

Karla Cabrera, a 29-year-old lawyer in Mexico City, was excited when she came across “Introduction to Mao Zedong Thought,” an online course about the Chinese revolutionary leader. She has a passion for Chinese history, and she hoped the class would shed light on the brutal political battles that took place under Mao’s rule. But when Ms. Cabrera began watching the lectures on edX, a popular online education platform owned and administered by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she was disappointed. Each class opened with a patriotic video montage.

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.”