首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
Getting into the Ivies [A] Ask just about any high school senior or junior — or their parents — and they’ll tell you that gettin
Getting into the Ivies [A] Ask just about any high school senior or junior — or their parents — and they’ll tell you that gettin
admin
2015-03-28
34
问题
Getting into the Ivies
[A] Ask just about any high school senior or junior — or their parents — and they’ll tell you that getting into a selective college is harder than it used to be. They’re right about that. But the reasons for the newfound difficulty are not well understood.
[B] Population growth plays a role, but the number of teenagers is not too much higher than it was 30 years ago, when the youngest baby boomers were still applying to college. And while many more Americans attend college than in the past, most of the growth has occurred at colleges with relatively few resources and high dropout rates, which bear little resemblance to the elites.
[C] So what else is going on? One overlooked factor is that top colleges are admitting fewer American students than they did a generation ago. Colleges have globalized over that time, deliberately increasing the share of their student bodies that come from overseas and leaving fewer slots for applicants from the United States. For American teenagers, it is really harder to get into Harvard — or Yale, Stanford, Brown, Boston College or many other elite colleges — than it was when today’s 40-year-olds or 50-year-olds were applying. The number of spots filled by American students at Harvard, after adjusting for the size of the teenage population nationwide, has dropped 27 percent since 1994. At Yale and Dartmouth, the decline has been 24 percent. At Carleton, it’s 22 percent. At Notre Dame and Princeton, it is 14 percent.
[D] The frenzy (狂热) over admissions at top colleges can seem nonstop: the last-minute flurry (忙乱) as accepted students decide by May 1 where to attend, the Supreme Court battles over affirmative action (反歧视运动), the applications that some high school juniors have already begun writing. Yet the globalization of these colleges has been largely missing from the discussion.
[E] This globalization obviously brings some big benefits. It has exposed American students to perspectives that our proudly parochial (狭隘的) country often does not provide in childhood. "It would be a lesser education for them if they didn’t get a chance to interact with some international students," as William Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions at Harvard since 1986, told me. The trend also fits with the long American tradition of luring some of the world’s most talented people here. Many international students who come for college never leave. Some of them found companies or make other contributions to society.
[F] Yet the way in which American colleges have globalized comes with costs, too. For one thing, the rise in foreign students has complicated the colleges’ stated efforts to make their classes more economically diverse. Foreign students often receive very little financial aid and tend to be from well-off families. For another thing, the country’s most selective colleges have effectively shrunk as far as American students are concerned, during the same span that many students and their parents are spending more time obsessing over getting into one.
[G] Many numbers for individual colleges here come from Noodle, a company that provides advice on education decisions. I combined the numbers with census data on the number of 18- to 21-year-olds in the United States to examine what share of college-age Americans in four different years — 1984, 1994, 2004 and 2012 — were attending various elite colleges. The share for any individual college is extremely small, of course. In 2012, about 33 out of every 100,000 American 18- to 21-year-olds were attending Harvard, down from 45 per 100,000 in 1994. These changes in the share tell you how much harder, or easier, admission has become for American teenagers on average. Between 1984 and 1994, it became easier at many colleges. The college-age population in this country fell during that time to 14.1 million in 1994 from 16.5 million in 1984, and the number of foreign students was relatively stable.
[H] I attended college in the early 1990s, and these numbers made me realize how easy the application process was for me and my peers, relative to almost any other time over the past half century. By the 2000s, the so-called echo boom in births had increased the number of college-age Americans. It reached 17.9 million in 2012. The number of foreign students was growing at the same time. They now constitute close to 10 percent of the student body at many selective colleges, nearly double the level of the early 1990s.
[I] The result is those big declines in the number of available seats for any given American teenager. Only colleges that have rapidly expanded their student bodies, like Columbia and the University of Chicago, have avoided the pattern. Obviously, the averages do not apply equally across the board. For students from the Northeast applying to elite colleges in the region, college admissions have probably become even more difficult in recent decades than these statistics suggest. Not only have colleges globalized, they have also become less regional, admitting more students from states like North Carolina, Texas and Washington.
[J] To many individual students, the newfound difficulty probably doesn’t cause much harm (even if it does cause anxiety). Over the last 20 years, several large colleges, like N.Y.U. and the University of Southern California, have improved markedly, effectively increasing the number of seats on elite campuses, Noodle has noted. And there is still scant (不足的) evidence that the selectivity of the college one attends matters much. Students with similar SAT scores who attended colleges of different selectivity — say, Penn and Penn State — had statistically identical incomes in later years, according to research by the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger.
[K] There was one exception, though: low-income students, who did seem to benefit from attending an elite college. Maybe they benefited more from the social contacts they made there or were more likely to drop out if they did not attend a top college. Either way, the research stresses a problem with the way colleges have globalized. With only a handful of exceptions (including Harvard, Amherst, M.I.T. and Yale), colleges have not tried hard to recruit an economically diverse group of foreign students. The students instead have become a revenue source. Sarah Turner and Kelli Bird, University of Virginia economists, have found that the enrollment of undergraduate foreign students fluctuates with the economic growth and exchange rates of those students’ countries of origin. The pattern is much stronger among undergraduates than doctoral students — a sign that the undergraduates’ families are paying their way.
[L] In recent years, college administrators have repeatedly claimed that enrolling a more economically diverse group of students is a top priority. But their actions don’t always match their words. While some have made progress, the students at many remain overwhelmingly affluent. On average, about 15 percent of students at elite colleges receive Pell grants, which as a rule of thumb go to students in the bottom half of the income distribution.
[M] Foreign students — typically well-off ones — have become another group that college admissions offices have decided should be well represented in every freshman class, along with "legacy" applicants (the children of alumni), varsity (校队) athletes and underrepresented minorities. A large fraction of these groups comes from high-income families. And all of them, along now with students from around the world, are a higher priority for colleges than poor students. Low-income applicants are left to compete for the remaining slots with applicants who have the highest test scores, most impressive extracurricular activities and most eloquent essays.
[N] The globalization of elite colleges, then, is a fitting case study of how higher education has transformed itselfin the last half century. After decades of being dominated by male students coming from a narrow network of prep schools, these schools have become a patchwork of diversity — gender, race, religion and now geography. Underneath the surface, though, that patchwork still has some common threads.
Colleges have deliberately admitted more international students over the past generation.
选项
答案
C
解析
段第2句提到,一流大学现在录取的美国学生比它们在二三十年前(a generation)录取的要少。第3句的that time指的第2句的a generation ago,该句讲的是,在过去的二三十年大学已经全球化,它们刻意增加了海外生源的比例,留给本国申请生的份额变少了。题目是对[C]段第3句话部分内容的同义转述。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/Bvh7777K
0
大学英语六级
相关试题推荐
OnVillageOfficialsWhenthejobmarketworsens,manystudentsfiguretheycan’tindulge(沉溺于)inanEnglishorahistorymaj
OnModestyAttentiontodetailissomethingeveryonecanandshoulddo—especiallyinatightjobmarket.BobCrossley,ahum
A、Harmtosingersdonebysmokyatmospheres.B、Sideeffectsofsomecommondrugs.C、Voiceproblemsamongpopsingers.D、Hardship
A、Ateacher.B、Anengineer.C、Arepairman.D、Asurgeon.D事实细节题。对话中女士问男士明天下午能否来参加她的生日聚会;男士说不能去,因为他明天下午3点要在手术室给一位病人做手术。由男士的话可知他是一位
HowCustomsWorkA)Oneofthelittleritualsallinternationaltravelersgothroughiscustoms.Tomostpeople,thisisjustano
HowCustomsWorkA)Oneofthelittleritualsallinternationaltravelersgothroughiscustoms.Tomostpeople,thisisjustano
A、VisitNancyathernewdepartment.B、CallonNancyathermedicalschool.C、GivethesecretaryNancy’snewphonenumber.D、Get
Part-TimeVegetarians[A]Forthelast15years,DawnJacksonBlatnerhasbeenwhat’snowcalleda"flexitarian"or"almostveget
A、Itfailedinthefinal.B、Itcouldn’treachthefinal.C、Ithasultimatelywonthefinal.D、Itisworkingveryhardforthefi
A、Begentletothevictimsandchildren.B、Beconsciousofthesurroundings.C、Stopssomeoneforatrafficviolation.D、Shootth
随机试题
简述盈余公积的用途。
建设项目的火灾危险性分析的内容包括(.)。
甲评估师执行某国有企业的评估项目(非重大和特殊项目),评估基准日2018年6月30日。在执行其他必要的评估程序之后,评估师完成了评估报告(评估报告日为2018年12月20日),并于2019年1月底完成工作底稿等评估档案的归档工作。评估档案在哪些情形下,
在双代号网络计划中,关键工作是()的工作。
下列各项中,关于房产税的免税规定,表述不正确的是()。
投资人在设立个人独资企业登记申请书上没有注明是以个人财产出资还是以家庭共有财产出资的,应以家庭共有财产对企业债务承担无限责任。()
MatchthegeneraladviceonmotivationwiththetechniquesforencouragingmotivationlistedA,B,CorD.TechniquesA.Encoura
简述利用影响力受贿罪的主体范围。(2012年一专一第52题)
Themind-successconnectionisstrong,andmanyobstaclestooursuccessarealsomental.Somepeoplerelymoreonfacts,while
A、Becausesheusedtheman’sscreen.B、Becausesheusedthewallinstead.C、Becauseshewouldbuyacheaperonelater.D、Because
最新回复
(
0
)