Penn in the News

Lernen ja, Abschluss nein

 Ezekiel Emanuel of the Wharton School and the Perelman School of Medicine and Christian Terwiesch of Wharton are quoted about massive open online courses.

College Rankings That Matter: Hottest Students, Most Weed, Ugliest Campus

 Princeton’s at the top of the U.S. News and World Report list of best colleges, again, followed by Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, and University of Chicago. Some people surely agree. Others think the ranking system is flawed, biased, irrelevant, or perhaps all of the above.

The Path to Change Runs Through the Provost’s Office

Lomax Continues to Focus on Lifelong Mission

 Marybeth Gasman of the Graduate School of Education is quoted.

What Is the Point of College?

I gave my first university lecture in philosophy at the University of Ghana, Legon, when I was a freshly credentialed 21-year-old. My audience was a couple of hundred students gathered in a vast hall, with ceiling fans to move the hot and humid air.

Audio: Why Are Women Less Likely to Become Entrepreneurs Than Men?

Research on entrepreneurial projects funded through Kickstarter, co-authored by Ethan Mollick of the Wharton School, is featured.

Is It Time to Tax Harvard’s Endowment?

“The joke about Harvard is that it’s a hedge fund with a university attached to it,” Mark Schneider tells me. It’s a quip that, for obvious reasons, has become pretty popular in recent years. In 2014, the university’s legendary endowment, overseen by a team of in-house experts and spread across a mind-bending array of investments that range from stocks and bonds to California wine vineyards, hit $36.4 billion.

Higher Education’s Internet Outrage Machine

Campus Reform carefully tracks how well it creates headaches in academe. On a dry-erase board in its offices here, the online publication tallies numbers related to its mission of exposing liberal "bias and abuse" at American colleges. In mid-August, the board showed that so far this year it had published more than 530 articles, seven of which had been featured by the Drudge Report, an online conservative news hub that drives big audiences.

U. of Georgia Bets $4.4 Million That Small Classes Can Bolster Learning

 The University of Georgia, seeking to improve the classroom experience of its undergraduates, has begun a faculty hiring spree to reduce enrollments in hundreds of courses. The university will hire 56 full-time, teaching-focused lecturers and professors over this academic year. It is one of several recent efforts at the research-focused institution to improve its educational environment. Others include the creation of a series of freshman seminars and the requirement that incoming students participate in a hands-on learning experience.

New Helmets Could Help Doctors ‘See’ Concussions on the Football Field

 Shu Yang of the School of Engineering and Applied Science is highlighted for leading researchers in creating a color-changing material that can signal traumatic brain injuries.