When journalist Karen Arenson accepted the New York Times’ higher-education beat, the job came with a caveat: she had to cut volunteer ties to the Institute. That was 1996, and she was partway through her yearlong term as Alumni Association president and serving on the MIT Corporation. Volunteering had been an interest for her and her husband, Greg Arenson ‘70, since graduation. She’d held leadership roles for her class and the New York MIT club, served on the Corporation’s executive committee, and interviewed prospective students.
The Times let her finish her Alumni Association presidency, but she resigned from other volunteer roles. Before long, her stories were helping boost the paper’s reputation for higher-education coverage. Arenson was one of the first mainstream-press journalists to uncover startling trends in early-decision admissions and aggressive endowment management. “Because I like to look at data, I tend to see things others might not,” she says.
Though Arenson had been editor of her high-school paper and managing editor of the Tech, she always considered journalism a side interest. She majored in economics at MIT and received a master’s in public policy at Harvard. But her perspective changed when she landed a summer internship surveying delegates to the 1972 Republican National Convention for the Miami Herald. “I liked the way journalism got me out and talking to people and in the middle of things,” she says.
Don’t settle for half the story.
Get paywall-free access to technology news for the here and now.
