5/18
Penn in the News
A round-up of Penn mentions in local, national, and international media.
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Penn In the News
The MOOC Hype Fades, in 3 Charts
Few people would now be willing to argue that massive open online courses are the future of higher education. The percentage of institutions offering a MOOC seems to be leveling off, at around 14 percent, while suspicions persist that MOOCs will not generate money or reduce costs for universities—and are not, in fact, sustainable.
Penn In the News
How Students’ Economic Diversity Varies by College Type
The Alliance for Higher Education and Democracy in the Graduate School of Education is cited for a collaborative report on income inequality in higher education.
Penn In the News
Foreign Students Aren’t Edging Out Locals, Numbers Show
International enrollments in American colleges may have soared in recent years, but despite public concern, there’s little to indicate that students from Beijing and Shanghai are displacing those from Buffalo or Santa Fe. A Chronicle analysis of enrollment data reported to the U.S.
Penn In the News
App Gives Students an Incentive to Keep Their Phones Locked in Class
Resisting the urge to pull out your phone in class is quite difficult for many students, apparently. There are texts to answer, emails to read, snapchats to send, and rude comments to post on Yik Yak.
Penn In the News
Should Colleges Be Forced to Swiftly Report Rapes to the Police?
Two former football players are convicted of raping an unconscious student at Vanderbilt University while their friends record the assaults on their cellphones. A star swimmer at Stanford University is charged with raping another intoxicated, passed-out woman and is banned from the campus.
Penn In the News
Colleges Raised a Record $1.26-Billion for Sports in 2014
Wealthy donors are fueling a boom in gifts to major-college sports programs, with the biggest athletics departments reporting a total of more than $1-billion in donations last year, according to a survey released this week by the Council for Aid to Education. It’s the third time in the past four years that sports gifts have topped $1-billion.
Penn In the News
Fracking Researchers Under Pressure
It started on a Texas farm called Hard Scrabble. It was there that Robert B. Jackson, now a professor of environmental earth system science at Stanford University, encountered the gas boom to come. His father-in-law, the environmental writer John Graves, had made Hard Scrabble famous in his books. So Mr. Jackson was surprised, nearly a decade ago, when news came that Mr.
Penn In the News
The Credit Hour Is Here to Stay, at Least for Now
The Carnegie Unit has been around for more than a century, and unless someone can come up with a better way of tracking college credit, it won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. It presents challenges, but it has value because it sets minimum instructional standards.
Penn In the News
A New Faculty Challenge: Fending Off Abuse on Yik Yak
The three Eastern Michigan University professors had no idea that they were under attack by the Honors College students seated before them. The three women knew that many of the nearly 230 freshmen in the auditorium resented having to show up at 9 a.m. every Friday for a mandatory interdisciplinary-studies class.
Penn In the News
Botching Sexual-Assault Complaints Is Costly, Study Finds
A student tells her RA or coach that she was sexually assaulted, but that person doesn’t alert campus authorities. A staff member dissuades a student from officially reporting an assault by warning her how grueling the process will be. A college finds an alleged perpetrator responsible for an assault without considering text messages from his accuser that don’t refer to their encounter as an assault.