Penn in the News

Tom Wadden of the Perelman School of Medicine comments on how the weight of fathers is not on physicians’ radar when monitoring the weight of an expectant and/or new mother.

The beer-soaked streets leading to Jackson Square in this city’s historic French Quarter bustled on Monday evening with characteristic revelry – and a short-lived, if chaotic, debate over student loan debt. “They’re coming,” a face-painted man in a full-body alligator costume yelled from his bicycle. “They’re two blocks away.” With that warning, several dozen student activists, staged strategically at a corner bar, finished their drinks, gathered their protest signs, and geared up for action. The target?

Here are my top 7 mistakes that pundits and critics make when they talk about open online education: Mistake #1:  "Open Online Courses Are a Substitute for Traditional Courses" Higher order learning is an activity that cannot be scaled. Foundational knowledge may be appropriate for a MOOC (or a textbook, or even a really well-designed educational video game), but advanced learning works best with an educator.

The international opportunity is not one U.S. colleges and universities can afford to overlook.

With the use of race in college admissions banned in a number of states and facing an uncertain future in the U.S. Supreme Court, institutions of higher learning must become more strategic about how they achieve racial and economic diversity on campus.

Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School writes about Hillary Clinton’s profit sharing proposal.

Richard Ingersoll of the Graduate School of Education and the School of Arts & Sciences is cited for studying teacher retention.

Few selective colleges have changed their admissions practices since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin two years ago, according to a report released on Tuesday by the American Council on Education. Yet many institutions, it found, have since embraced various strategies for increasing racial and socioeconomic diversity in their student body.

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

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."