Penn in the News

Peter Cappelli of the Wharton School critiques the shift toward “occupationally-focused majors and degrees.”

It was there and then it wasn’t: a controversial issue of a Northwestern University bioethics journal about sex and disability featuring one scholar’s account of receiving oral sex from a nurse as part of his rehabilitative process. Did Northwestern demand the removal of the journal essay from the university’s website and threaten to review all forthcoming issues prior to publication? That’s what faculty members claims happened last year. Northwestern, meanwhile, acknowledges that the archive issue of the journal was taken down, but isn’t saying why, or why it was later restored.

Richard Ingersoll of the Graduate School of Education and the School of Arts & Sciences is cited his collaborative report “Seven Trends: The Transformation of the Teaching Force.”

University of Virginia student Martese Johnson was doing nothing wrong the night he ended up bloodied and in a jail cell after an encounter with state Alcoholic Beverage Control officers, a prosecutor said Wednesday. Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman spent more than two hours publicly laying out the evidence from a Virginia State Police investigation into the 33-second incident early March 18 during St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. Photographs depicting Johnson, who is black, on the ground underneath a white officer went viral online and sparked protests on the U-Va.

Fernando Ferreira and Joseph Gyourko of the Wharton School are mentioned for their new working paper that argues “the idea that subprime lending triggered the crisis is misguided.”

Deirdre Sawinski and Jonathan Maltzman of the Perelman School of Medicine share their thoughts on how environmental factors can alter the response to organ transplantation.

Officials at one health professions campus think it's just common sense to encourage students and employees to make healthy decisions about what they drink. So the University of California at San Francisco, where all programs are in the health professions, is becoming the first college nationally to stop the sale of sugary beverages on campus. That means no Coke or Pepsi, or plenty of other products.

My recent article on student debt prompted many questions from readers who were hungry for more detail. I had provided statistics on all undergraduates, but many readers wanted to see debt for those who graduated with a bachelor’s degree. When you break out the borrowing data by educational attainment, students who get bachelor’s degrees are more likely to borrow than the typical college student. This makes sense: When you stay in school longer, you have more years of tuition to pay and more opportunities to borrow. Fifteen percent of those with a B.A.

James Wilson of the Perelman School of Medicine comments on Penn’s partnership with Wuxi AppTec Inc. to develop a gene therapy manufacturing plant.

Michael Useem of the Wharton School talks about what it takes to improve the Transportation Security Administration.