Penn in the News

In an era of increasing scrutiny and growing financial difficulty, health care and higher education face many of the same challenges: disruption, rising prices, consumer criticism, decreasing public funds and an increasing need for collaborations and mergers. “There’s a huge amount of discussion in health care around quality,” said Emme Deland, senior vice president for strategy at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, during the National Association of College and University Business Officers' annual meeting here.

Like the country in general, faculty members at American colleges have become more ethnically and racially diverse over the past two decades. Eighty-five percent of full-time and part-time faculty members at all colleges in 1993 were white; by 2013, the latest year for which national data are available, that figure had fallen to 72 percent. Even so, academe doesn’t yet mirror the U.S. population, which was 63 percent white in 2013. Diversifying the faculty remains a challenge particularly at liberal-arts colleges.

Doctoral candidate Kecheng Fang of the Annenberg School for Communication is quoted about how Chinese media envision a political race between Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton.

Susan Wachter of the Wharton School shares her insight on the Chinese real estate market.

Mauro Guillén of the Wharton School comments on the financial troubles in Puerto Rico.

Jean Bennett and Manzar Ashtari of the Perelman School of Medicine are highlighted for researching a gene therapy that treats blindness and helps strengthen pathways to the brain.

Meenakshi Bewtra of the Perelman School of Medicine and lead author of the study cited says, “We often think of surgery as being more ‘dangerous’ in patients who are older but this study shows that surgery is quite the opposite.”

Families are spending more on college, but parents are less concerned about that investment paying off, according to the results of a new survey from Sallie Mae, the student lender. The study is based on phone interviews with 800 traditional-aged undergraduates and 800 parents of traditional-aged students. It is the eight installment of the survey. Results show that spending on college was up across the board this year, but that a 25 percent increase by high-income families was responsible for the bulk of the increase.

Sy Stokes typed the words into his phone. He typed during class, on the way to dinner, and long after midnight while his roommates slept. Whenever something angered him, he’d write a line or two. One day he sat down to gather the words into a poem. It begins softly, then turns fierce as thunder. That was late summer, 2013. Mr. Stokes, then a junior at the University of California at Los Angeles, had performed his own spoken-word poetry at open-mic events. He had written lyrics about love and the mystery of beauty: "How a rat will look at a bat / Like it has the wings of an angel."

Charles O’Brien of the Perelman School of Medicine comments on repeat DUI offenses.