Penn in the News

Should a 17-year-old college freshman be considered a child? Pennsylvania says yes, and that has some of the state’s colleges and universities scrambling to figure out how to comply with a new child abuse protection law. The law, Act 153, requires more extensive child abuse background checks for employees and volunteers who have “routine interaction” with children, including a 17-year-old freshman.

Dan Rader of the Perelman School of Medicine comments on how cholesterol is produced in your blood.

College wrestling coaches typically do not send young men the message that they’re at risk of becoming helpless victims. But C.D. Mock, the head wrestling coach at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has mounted a very public campaign to do just that.

Ezekiel Emanuel of the Perelman School of Medicine and the Wharton School comments on leading a study about cancer patients requesting medical treatment.

About 30 percent of freshmen at the least selective colleges plan to transfer to another institution before completing their degree, according to the 

It’s Mardi Gras week in New Orleans, and students at Tulane University are busy prepping for the weekend’s celebrations. But for some students, getting into the party spirit this year is proving difficult. "Students are trying to stay positive, and of course many of them are excited for Mardi Gras weekend,” Dusty Porter, Tulane’s vice president of student affairs, said.

Joshua Plotkin of the School of Arts & Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Science is featured for applying the “prisoner’s dilemma” to evolving populations.

A “select handful” of University of Texas applicants are approved each year at the direction of the school president over the objections of the admissions office, a longtime practice that has grown in recent years,

A big question for MOOCs, the free online courses that hundreds of colleges now offer, is whether employers will take them seriously as credentials. But some of the biggest MOOC producers may have figured out how to jump-start employer buy-in: Get big-name companies to help design them.

Doubts about the labor-market returns of bachelor’s degrees, while never serious, can be put to rest.