Recent News

PhD student Ralph Spinelli is in the last stages of terminal cancer, but his bucket list just got a little shorter. The 74-year-old doctoral student and advocate for criminal justice reform had dreamed of meeting Jack Nicklaus to thank him for being a long-time inspiration. Ralph wrote to the golf legend and was invited, with his son, on an all-expense paid trip to Dublin, Ohio for the Memorial Tournament, which Jack Nicklaus founded.  “I wanted to shake his…

Perhaps not surprisingly, grad students tend to take on more debt when going into fields where the pay is higher. Students studying medicine and law typically borrow more than $100,000 to get through school, and many go on to high-paying careers. At the other end of the spectrum, many Ph.D. students wind up in academia. Most get grants and subsidies — and the majority don't have to borrow any money at all to get through grad school. One striking…

Brian Chesky’s business, Airbnb, is the focus of renewed attempts to regulate the short-term rental market in S.F. On Tuesday, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors will for the second time this summer consider amendments to the Airbnb law regulating short-term rentals to fix the mess former Supervisor David Chiu’s industry-sponsored bill created last year. Unfortunately, the competing amendments and upcoming ballot measure present the public with options that are either unnecessarily restrictive or, like…

This summer, over ninety Goldman School students are interning in government, nonprofit and private agencies throughout the US and the world.  Cesar Manuel Zulaica is working in southeast Asia with the for-profit social enterprise agency Next Billion, which explores the connection between development and business. Cesar is piloting several data-gathering applications including a project in Indonesia that is using one such app to follow up on the sanitation conditions and community behavior around water use. He is also working…

The Supreme Court's recent blessing of Obamacare has precipitated a rush among the nation's biggest health insurers to consolidate into two or three behemoths. The result will be good for their shareholders and executives, but bad for the rest of us -- who will pay through the nose for the health insurance we need. We have another choice, but before I get to it let me give you some background. Last week, Aetna announced it would spend $35 billion…

“We are proud of the charge San Francisco led to ensure marriage equality for all Americans," says Carmen Chu (MPP '03), San Francisco's Assessor-Recorder. "The movement was ignited in 2004 when we took the bold step to recognize same sex marriages. When California lifted the stay and resumed same sex marriages in 2013, I was proud to lead the way as the only County Recorder’s Office to remain open over the weekend so that loving couples did not have…