News & Notes: Harvard early applications jump by 15 percent
Harvard received 4,856 applications to its single-choice early action program, a 15 percent increase over the last year, when it first reinstated an early admission option.
Harvard received 4,856 applications to its single-choice early action program, a 15 percent increase over the last year, when it first reinstated an early admission option.
Robert Zoellick, who was president of the World Bank during the global financial crisis and held that position until this past June, challenged public policy students not to simply analyze a problem but to actually solve it in a lecture hosted by the Wilson School on Thursday.
Though Jacques Steinberg said he is not an expert on the Princeton admission process, the prominent New York Times reporter who runs ‘The Choice’ blog certainly knows the field of higher education. Before his lecture Thursday afternoon at an event hosted by the American Whig-Cliosophic Society, Steinberg sat down with the ‘Prince’ to discuss trends in the college admission process.
The presidential search committee solicited feedback from students in eight focus groups over the past two evenings, in hopes of getting direct feedback on what the student body wants from their new University president.
According to Ed Felten, a renowned expert on computer security and a Wilson School and computer science professor, the copyright meme circulating on Facebook walls which has been discredited by many commentators is “not entirely silly.”
All co-op members will be charged a $50 fee paid to the University beginning next semester, a result of a recommendation made by the University’s Priorities Committee, which crafts the University’s budget, and approved by the University’s Board of Trustees in January. Administrators said the increase in fees will help pay for the services the University provides the co-ops, but co-op leaders countered that they had not been consulted before the decision was made.
The Cyclab student co-op, which repaired bicycles for free, has closed down this fall after a divorce from its former partner organization, U-Bikes. It had been operating for six years.
At a gathering of legal experts Tuesday in which panel participants discussed the recent Supreme Court case Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, one audience member asked a question: “Is race-based affirmative action dead?”
At one of its last meetings before Princeton Borough and Princeton Township consolidate, the Transition Task Force discussed a forthcoming report to be produced by Wilson School graduate students on the consolidation process.
The University will allow staff members to apply for up to five days of paid leave to volunteer with Hurricane Sandy relief efforts. Following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the University implemented a similar policy.
Princeton is not one of the four universities that have offered former CIA director David Petraeus GS ’87 a position on its faculty, University Spokesperson Martin Mbugua said Tuesday. Last week, The New York Times reported that he had offers from four schools, though it did not name the schools.
When Alejandro Zaera-Polo was appointed as the new dean of the School of Architecture in March, student reactions were mixed. An informal poll circulated among the school's graduate students in March found that only five of 58 respondents approved of Zaera-Polo's selection.
After spending a month on campus in 2000, New York Times opinion columnist and conservative commentator David Brooks returned to campus to deliver a lecture on the recent cultural shift. Reflecting on his original moniker “Organization Kid” in his 2001 article for The Atlantic magazine, Brooks believes this “achievement ethos” has only deepened since he left campus more than a decade ago. After his lecture, Brooks sat down with the ‘Prince’ to expand upon his cultural observations and how they might relate to Princeton.
The iron fence that bordered the north side of Prospect House for over a century and became a topic of Princeton folklore has been permanently taken down.
Last week’s USG winter elections marked the first elections cycle in recent history in which all committee leadership elections were uncontested. USG vice president Stephen Stolzenberg ’13 said the large number of uncontested races represents “a failing on the part of our administration.”
While MIT, Harvard, Stanford and Yale all made the top five in a new study ranking U.S. colleges according to their students’ cognitive abilities, Princeton ranked 39th, behind Bucknell and Northeastern. Some psychologists, however, are questioning the methods of the study that ranks Princeton poorly.
Philosophy concentrator and campus Greek life leader Jake Nebel ’13 will be named the University’s sole winner of the 2013 Marshall Scholarship.Nebel, who is also pursuing a certificate in Values and Public Life, has already been published in multiple academic journals as an undergraduate. He will use the scholarship to complete the equivalent of a two-year master's degree at the University of Oxford.
New York Times opinion columnist and conservative commentator David Brooks described a recent cultural shift from self-effacement to self-advancement and warned of its implications for national politics.
The Harvard student body passed a referendum last week calling for divestment from the fossil fuel industry, echoing the referendum passed by the Princeton student body last spring to invest its endowment in “socially responsible ways.”
Cass Sunstein, President Barack Obama’s former chief regulator and the author of the award-winning “Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness,” highlighted the influence of default rules, or how existing norms and regulations can impact people’s behavior, in a lecture on Monday afternoon. Sunstein, now a professor at Harvard Law School, partially oversaw the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and financial regulatory reform during his time as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.