大學教育全球化讓美國人付出代價

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.

如果你去問任何高中高年級生或低年級生，抑或他們的家長，他們會告訴你，進入一所知名的大學比以前更難了。他們這麼說是對的。不過，人們並不充分了解帶來這種新難題的原因。

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.

人口增長是一個原因，不過青少年的人口比30年前高不了多少，那個時候，最年輕的嬰兒潮一代仍在申讀大學。和過去相比，現在有更多美國人進入大學，然而入學率的增長大多出現在那些資源相對較少，輟學率相對較高的的院校，這些院校和頂尖學府幾無相似之處。

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.

那麼，還有什麼原因在發揮作用？一個被忽略的因素是一流院校錄取的美國學生比一代人之前要少。這一代的時間裏，大學已經變得全球化了，它們刻意增加了海外生源的比例，給本國申請生留下的份額變少了。

For American teenagers, it really is 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.

對美國青少年而言，申請進入哈佛大學(Harvard)、或是耶魯(Yale)、斯坦福(Stanford)、布朗大學(Brown)、波士頓大學(Boston College)及其他許多名校，真的要比今天40多歲或50多歲的那代人申請進入這些大學時更困難。在根據全國青少年人口進行調整後，哈佛大學錄取的美國學生數量自1994年以來下降了27%。耶魯大學和達特茅斯學院(Dartmouth)錄取的美國學生下降了24%。卡爾頓學院(Carleton College)的比例下降了22%。馬里蘭聖母學院(Notre Dame)和普林斯頓大學(Princeton)的比例均下降了14%。

The frenzy over admissions at top colleges can seem nonstop: the last-minute flurry as accepted students decide by May 1 where to attend, the Supreme Court battles over affirmative action, the applications that some high school juniors have already begun writing. Yet the globalization of these colleges has been largely missing from the discussion.

一流學府的入學名額所引發的瘋狂狀況似乎永無止境，隨着被錄取的學生在5月1日前決定去哪所學校就讀，隨着最高法院(Supreme Court)就平權行動展開較量，隨着一些高中高年級生開始撰寫申請信，這場狂熱陷入了最後一分鐘的忙亂。然而，頂尖院校的全球化問題，基本上一直被此類討論遺漏在外。

This globalization obviously brings some big benefits. It has exposed American students to perspectives that our proudly parochial 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.

全球化顯然帶來了某些巨大的好處。他讓美國學生接觸到了國際視野，我們這個眼界狹隘的驕傲國家往往不會在孩提時代給兒童提供這種視野。自1986年以來一直負責哈佛大學招生工作的威廉·菲茨西蒙斯(William Fitzsimmons)對我說，“如果他們沒有機會和一些國際學生互動，那他們受到的教育就會縮水。”這種趨勢還和美國吸納全球一些最具天分的人才的長期傳統相契合。許多進入美國院校的國際學生留了下來。其中一些人在美國成立了公司，或者對社會做出了其它貢獻。

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 scant 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.

然而，美國院校全球化的方式也伴有一定的成本。首先，留學生的增多讓院校針對學生經濟背景多元化的公開舉措變得更麻煩。留學生得到的經濟援助甚少，他們往往來自富裕家庭。其次，就美國學生而言，本國最出色的院校基本上縮減了規模，於是在這段時間裏，許多學生和家長都在耗費更多的時間，冥思苦想着如何進入一所出色的院校。

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.

本文中和單個院校相關的大量數據，均來自Noodle公司，這是一家提供教育決策諮詢的公司。我把這些數字和美國人口普查中18到21歲的人口數據聯繫起來，查看了在1984、1994、2004和2012年這四個不同的年份，該年齡段的美國學生加入本國多所一流院校的比例。

The share for any individual college is minuscule, 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.

當然了，單看任何一家大學，這一比例都微乎其微。2012年，18到21歲的美國學生中，每10萬人中僅有約33人上哈佛，而1994年的數據是每10萬里有45人。這些比例變化能告訴我們，美國高中生平均的大學錄取情況變難或變易的程度。從1984年到1994年，許多高等學府的入學都變簡單了。在此期間，美國的大學適齡人口從1984年的1650萬下滑至1994年的1410萬，而海外學生人數相對平穩。

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.

我本人是在90年代初上的大學，而這些數字讓我意識到，與過去半個世紀的其他任何時段相比，自己與同齡人的大學申請過程是多麼地容易。到了本世紀的前10年，所謂的“回聲潮世代”增加了美國的大學適齡人口。2012年，這一數字達到了1790萬。與此同時，海外學生人數也在攀升。到了今天，許多頂尖學府的外國學生佔到學生總數的近10%，是90年代初的水平的幾乎兩倍。

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.

結果，對任何美國高中生而言，大學空缺均大幅下滑。只有快速擴招的高等院校，比如哥倫比亞大學和芝加哥大學(University of Chicago)，才避免了這一規律。

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.

顯然，平均狀況並不會均攤到每個角落。對申請東北部著名學府的本地區學生而言，近幾十年的錄取情況很可能比上述數據顯示得更加慘烈。各大院校不僅更爲全球化，而且也減少了地區色彩，更多地錄取來自北卡羅來納、德克薩斯和華盛頓等州的學生。

To many individual students, the newfound difficulty probably doesn't cause much harm (even if it does cause angst). 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.

對許多學生個體而言，這種新增的難度很可能無傷大雅（儘管的確會導致焦慮）。Noodle公司指出，過去20年間，包括紐約大學(NYU)和南加州大學(University of Southern California)在內的幾家大型院校進步顯著，實際上增加了一流大學的位置。

And there is still scant 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.

而且，仍然沒有什麼證據表明，人們所上高等院校的頂尖程度真有多大意義。根據經濟學家史黛西·戴爾(Stacy Dale)和艾倫·克魯格(Alan Krueger)所做的研究，擁有相似SAT分數的學生，就算上了水準不一的學校——比如賓大與賓州州立——後來的收入在統計學上也沒有差別。

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.

不過，其中還是存在一種例外：來自低收入家庭的學生，似乎的確能從上一流學府中受益。也許，他們能從此類學校的社會關係中更多地獲益，或者是因爲，如果沒去頂尖學府，他們退學的可能性更大。

Either way, the research underscores 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.

無論是哪種原因，研究結果都突顯了大學全球化過程中的一個問題。除了少數例外（包括哈佛、阿默斯特、麻省理工和耶魯），許多大學並沒有嘗試錄取更多來自不同經濟背景的外國學生，而是把外國學生當做了一個收入來源。

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.

弗吉尼亞大學的經濟學家莎拉·特納(Sarah Turner)和凱利·伯德(Kelli Bird)發現，大學本科外國學生的錄取數量隨着學生原籍國家的經濟增長和匯率的變化而出現波動。這個規律在本科生中比在博士研究生中更加明顯——這意味着，這些本科學生的學費由家裏負擔。

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.

最近幾年，高校的管理人員曾多次表示，將重視錄取不同經濟狀況的學生。但他們並沒有總是說到做到。儘管一些學校取得了進展，許多學校的大部分學生仍然非常富裕。平均來看，頂尖學府的學生中，約15%獲得了佩爾助學金(Pell)，根據經驗，該項助學金一般由家庭收入低於中值的學生獲得。

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 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.

外國學生——一般是富裕學生——已經成爲大學招生辦眼中又一個應該獲得良好比例的羣體，這種羣體還包括，校友子女申請人、體育生，以及比例過少的少數族裔。這些羣體中很大一部分來自高收入家庭。而他們中的所有人，現在又加上了來自世界各地的外國學生，對高校的重要性都要高於貧困生。

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.

低收入的申請人只能與分數最高、課外活動最突出和話題作文最有說服力的學生競爭剩下的名額。

The globalization of elite colleges, then, is a fitting case study of how higher education has transformed itself in 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.

因此，頂尖大學的全球化是高等教育過去半個世紀自我轉型的一個恰當的例子。在被來自少數固定預科學校的男學生主宰了幾十年之後，這些一流高校已經成爲多元化的萬花筒——性別、種族、宗教，現在還包括地域。不過，在多元化的表面之下，這個萬花筒裏的圖案仍然具有一些共同的線條。