Penn in the News

Business schools worry that not enough women see an M.B.A. in their future. B-school deans say the pipeline of young women may be running dry as fewer U.S. students overall appear to be interested in a graduate business degree.

With new technologies come new ways to cheat. Yik Yak, the anonymous, location-based app that has been a hotbed of cyberbullying on college campuses, is also the newest tool for students seeking to cheat on exams. J. Scott Christianson, an assistant teaching professor in the department of management at the University of Missouri at Columbia, has been monitoring Yik Yak recently to see what students are talking about.

“[T]hey can employ not just metaphor, but caricature, which can be harsh… Humor, mockery, satire. People don’t like to be made fun of. They don’t like their views to be made fun of, they don’t like their religion to be made fun of.

Penn State President Eric Barron on Tuesday evening snubbed a demand from seven alumni-elected board members that the university pay their legal fees for actions they have filed against the university to obtain information they say they need to carry out their duties. And in a sharply-worded email to the trustees, Barron blasted them for even asking.

Prashant Jha of the School of Arts & Sciences writes about recovery efforts following the earthquake in Nepal.

Ethan Mollick of the Wharton School shares his views on crowdfunding.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has chosen an unusual partner for its online M.B.A. program: massive open online course provider Coursera. The program, known as iMBA, will deliver most of its course content through Specializations, Coursera’s term for course sequences. Students will be able to take those sequences in four different ways -- two that award credit and two that don’t.

The names of the two colleges -- Sweet Briar and Deep Springs -- are redolent of bucolic campuses. One is in rural Virginia, in the foothills near Lynchburg, and the other is in California's high desert ranch lands east of Bishop. But the names of the schools are now linked by something else: the struggles of the dwindling number of single-sex colleges to survive or possibly become co-ed.

Jay Giri of the Perelman School of Medicine says, “The Lariat is an absolutely ingenious piece of engineering… However, ingenuity doesn’t guarantee its safety and efficacy.”

Samuel Jacobson and Jean Bennett of the Perelman School of Medicine are quoted about the impact of gene therapy on sight.