大学教育全球化让美国人付出代价

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.
对许多学生个体而言，这种新增的难度很可能无伤大雅（尽管的确会导致焦虑）。Noodle公司指出，过去20年间，包括纽约大学(NYU)和南加州大学(University of Southern California)在内的几家大型院校进步显著，实际上增加了一流大学的位置。

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，仍然没有什么证据表明，人们所上高等院校的顶尖程度真有多大意义。根据经济学家史黛西·戴尔(Stacy Dale)和艾伦·克鲁格(Alan Krueger)所做的研究，拥有相似SAT分数的学生，就算上了水准不一的学校——比如宾大与宾州州立——后来的收入在统计学上也没有差别。

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.
不过，其中还是存在一种例外：来自低收入家庭的学生，似乎的确能从上一流学府中受益。也许，他们能从此类学校的社会关系中更多地获益，或者是因为，如果没去顶尖学府，他们退学的可能性更大。

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.
无论是哪种原因，研究结果都突显了大学全球化过程中的一个问题。除了少数例外（包括哈佛、阿默斯特、麻省理工和耶鲁），许多大学并没有尝试录取更多来自不同经济背景的外国学生，而是把外国学生当做了一个收入来源。

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.
弗吉尼亚大学的经济学家莎拉·特纳(Sarah Turner)和凯利·伯德(Kelli Bird)发现，大学本科外国学生的录取数量随着学生原籍国家的经济增长和汇率的变化而出现波动。这个规律在本科生中比在博士研究生中更加明显——这意味着，这些本科学生的学费由家里负担。

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.
最近几年，高校的管理人员曾多次表示，将重视录取不同经济状况的学生。但他们并没有总是说到做到。尽管一些学校取得了进展，许多学校的大部分学生仍然非常富裕。平均来看，顶尖学府的学生中，约15%获得了佩尔助学金(Pell)，根据经验，该项助学金一般由家庭收入低于中值的学生获得。

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.
外国学生——一般是富裕学生——已经成为大学招生办眼中又一个应该获得良好比例的群体，这种群体还包括，校友子女申请人、体育生，以及比例过少的少数族裔。这些群体中很大一部分来自高收入家庭。而他们中的所有人，现在又加上了来自世界各地的外国学生，对高校的重要性都要高于贫困生。

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.
低收入的申请人只能与分数最高、课外活动最突出和话题作文最有说服力的学生竞争剩下的名额。

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，顶尖大学的全球化是高等教育过去半个世纪自我转型的一个恰当的例子。在被来自少数固定预科学校的男学生主宰了几十年之后，这些一流高校已经成为多元化的万花筒——性别、种族、宗教，现在还包括地域。不过，在多元化的表面之下，这个万花筒里的图案仍然具有一些共同的线条。