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  3. For America’s colleges, January is a month of reckoning. Most applications for the next academic year beginning in the autumn ha

For America’s colleges, January is a month of reckoning. Most applications for the next academic year beginning in the autumn ha

admin2011-03-10  59
问题   For America’s colleges, January is a month of reckoning. Most applications for the next academic year beginning in the autumn have to be made by the end of December, so a university’s popularity is put to an objective standard: how many people want to attend. One of the more unlikely offices to have been flooded with mail is that of the City University of New York (CUNY), a public college that lacks, among other things, a famous sports team, pastoral campuses and boisterous parties (it doesn’t even have dorms), and, until recently, academic credibility.
   A primary draw at CUNY is a programmer for particularly clever students, launched in 2001. Some 1, 100 of the 60,000 students at CUNY’s five top schools receive a rare thing in the costly world of American colleges: free education. Those accepted by CUNY’s honors programmer pay no tuition fees; instead they receive a stipend of $7, 500 (to help with general expenses) and a laptop computer. Applications for early admissions into next year’s programme are up 70%.
   Admission has nothing to do with being an athlete, or a child of an alunmus, or having an influential sponsor, or being a member of a particularly aggrieved ethnic group—criteria that are increasingly important at America’s elite colleges. Most of the students who apply to the honours programme come from relatively poor families, many of them immigrant ones. All that CUNY demands is that these students be diligent and clever.
   Last year, the average standardised test score of this group was in the top 7% in the country. Among the rest of CUNY’s students averages are lower, but they are now just breaking into the top third (compared with the bottom third in 1997). CUNY does not appear alongside Harvard and Stanford on lists of America’s top colleges, but its recent transformation offers a neat parable of meritocracy revisited.
   Until the 1960s, a good case could be made that the best deal in American tertiary education was to be found not in Cambridge or Palo Alto, but in Harlem, at a small public school called City College, the core of CUNY. America’s first free municipal university, founded in 1847, offered its services to everyone bright enough to meet its grueling standards.
   City’s golden era came in the last century, when America’s best known colleges restricted the number of Jewish students they would admit at exactly the time when New York was teeming with the bright children of poor Jewish immigrants. In 1933—54 City produced nine future Nobel laureates, including the 2005 winner for economics, Robert Aumann (who graduated in 1950).
   What went wrong? Put simply, City dropped its standards. It was partly to do with demography, partly to do with earnest muddle headedness. In the 1960s, universities across the country faced intense pressure to admit more minority students. Although City was open to all races, only a small number of black and Hispanic students passed the strict tests (including a future secretary of state, Colin Powell). That, critics decided, could not be squared with City’s mission to "serve all the citizens of New York". At first the standards were tweaked, but this was not enough, and in 1969 massive student protests shut down City’s campus for two weeks. Faced with upheaval, City scrapped its admissions standards altogether. By 1970, almost any student who graduated from New York’s high schools could attend.
   The quality of education collapsed. At first, with no barrier to entry, enrolment climbed, but in 1976 the city of New York, which was then in effect bankrupt, forced CUNY to impose tuition fees. An era of free education was over, and a university which had once served such a distinct purpose joined the muddle of America’s lower-end education.
   By 1997, seven out of ten first-year students in the CUNY system were failing at least one remedial test in reading, writing or moths ( meaning that they had not learnt it to high-school standard). A report commissioned by the city in 1999 concluded that "Central to CUNY’s historic mission is a commitment to provide broad access, but its students’ high drop-out rates and low graduation rates raise the question: Access to what?"  
The difference between CUNY and America’s elite colleges lies in
选项 A、tuition fees.
B、admission standards.
C、application procedures.
D、honor programs.
答案B
解析 推断题。第二段分析了the City University of New York之所以有吸引力的主因：为聪明过人的学生所设立的培养计划。第三段首句提到该培养计划的录取标准：Admission has nothing to do with being an athlete，or a child of an alumnus，or having an influential sponsor，or being a member of a particularly aggrieved ethnic group…由最后的criteria that are increasingly important at America’s elite colleges可以看出，这些标准是其他精英大学重视的录取标准，却不是纽约城市大学的，显然可以推断出[B]，故为答案。这里只在第二段第三句提到Those accepted by CUNY’s honours programme pay no tuition fees…，并未提及其他大学的学费，无法进行对比，[A]无根据；文中未涉及申请及录取流程，排除[C]；[D]干扰性较强，但这里只提到CUNY的荣誉计划，对其他学校的类似计划没有提及，也缺乏对比的基础，排除。  
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