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Penn in the News
A round-up of Penn mentions in local, national, and international media.
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Penn In the News
Video: Do Your Homework Before Donating on ‘Giving Tuesday’
Katherina Rosqueta of the School for Social Policy & Practice’s Center for High Impact Philanthropy offers advice about researching the effectiveness of charities.
Penn In the News
A Rare Condition Unfamiliar in U.S.
Michael Rubenstein of the Perelman School of Medicine pens an article about the rare disorder, Sydenham’s chorea.
Penn In the News
In Admissions, the Powerful Weigh In
Last spring, Brent W. Sembler saw an opening that might help him land a big gift. As he had done many times before, the Florida State University trustee sent a query to Janice V. Finney, longtime director of admissions. Was this student, who had been denied in December, perhaps "admissible?" Mr. Sembler asked. "Here’s why I’m asking," the trustee wrote in an email. The student’s "family is capable of funding our new Business School!" With a core grade-point average below 3.0, Ms. Finney said, fall admission was not possible.
Penn In the News
Can the Student Course Evaluation Be Redeemed?
In the coming weeks, students will participate in a ritual as familiar as it is reviled: evaluating their instructors. One of the latest and most visible critiques of these assessments came this year from Carl E. Wieman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. He cast doubt on their validity and reliability, proposing that instead, professors complete an inventory of the research-based teaching practices they use. That would be more likely to promote learning than garden-variety evaluations do, Mr.
Penn In the News
With Diversity Comes Intensity in Amherst Free Speech Debate
Hundreds of students crammed into Amherst College’s Robert Frost Library for a sit-in against racial injustice that turned into a confessional, as one black or Hispanic student after another rose to talk about feelings of alienation and invisibility on campus. In the heat of the moment, the students drafted a list of demands for the administration. They wanted the college to stop calling its athletes the Lord Jeffs, after Lord Jeffery Amherst, the pre-Revolutionary War British commander who advocated germ warfare against Native Americans and for whom this college town was named.
Penn In the News
A Wharton Professor Explains 3 Ways Nice Guys Can Get Ahead at Work
Strategies for effective giving from the Wharton School’s Adam Grant’s book Give and Take.
Penn In the News
Switchback: The Startup Strategy That Might Be Right for You
Research that finds the benefits of a “switchback” approach for technology entrepreneurs co-authored by David Hsu of the Wharton School is highlighted.
Penn In the News
Student Debt in America: Lend With a Smile, Collect With a Fist
The American student loan crisis is often seen as a problem of profligacy and predation. Wasteful colleges raise tuition every year, we are told, even as middle-class wages stagnate and unscrupulous for-profit colleges bilk the unwary. The result is mounting unmanageable debt. There is much truth in this diagnosis. But it does not explain the plight of Liz Kelley, a Missouri high school teacher and mother of four who made a series of unremarkable decisions about college and borrowing. She now owes the federal government $410,000, and counting. This is a staggering and unusual sum.
Penn In the News
Discount Much?
Is a high discount rate a guaranteed trouble sign for colleges? Not necessarily, experts say -- sometimes colleges can leverage discounts to increase revenue, at least if they are increasing enrollment. But maintaining very high discount rates can be a risky strategy and an indicator a college is in distress. The average discount rate offered by colleges to first-year students has risen significantly in recent years.
Penn In the News
How Much Can Campus-Crime Reports Tell Us About Sexual Assault?
The statistic was shocking: Nine out of 10 colleges reported no rapes on their campuses in 2014. That finding, released on Monday by the American Association of University Women, seemed to contradict recent surveys of female undergraduates, as well as an oft-cited — and controversial — statistic that one in five women are sexually assaulted during their time in college. Advocates and researchers agreed something was amiss. But what do the low rates of rape reports — drawn from the campus-crime-reporting law known as the Clery Act — really mean? Here are three possibilities: