The case for college has been accepted without question for more than a generation. All high school graduates ought to go, because college will help them earn more money, become “better” people, and learn to be more responsible citizens than those who don’t go.
上大学毫无疑问已经被好几代人接受了。所有高中毕业生都应该去上大学，因为大学将帮助他们赚更多的钱，成为“更好”的人，并学会成为比那些没有上大学的人更负责任的公民。
But college has never been able to work its magic for everyone. And now that close to half our high school graduates are attending, those who don’t fit the pattern are becoming more and more, and more obvious. College graduates are selling shoes and driving taxis; college students get in the way of each other’s experiments and write false letters of recommendation in the competition for admission to graduate school. Others find no interest in their studies, and drop out –often encouraged by college administrators. Some observers say the fault is with the young people themselves—they are spoiled and they are expecting too much.
但大学不可能为每个人施展魔法。现在，我们有近一半的高中毕业生在上学，那些不符合这种模式的人越来越多，越来越明显。大学毕业生卖鞋、开出租车；大学生在研究生入学竞争中互相妨碍实验，写虚假的推荐信。其他人则对自己的学习不感兴趣，并辍学——往往是受到大学管理人员的鼓励。一些观察人士说，问题出在年轻人身上——他们被宠坏了，期望过高。
But that is a condemnation of the students as a whole, and does not explain all campus unhappiness. Others blame the state of the world, and they are partly right. We’ve been told that young people have to go to college because our economy cannot take in an army of untrained 18 year-olds. But disappointed graduates are learning that it can no longer take in an army of trained 22-year-olds, either.
但这是一种对学生整体的谴责，并不能解释所有的校园不快。其他人指责世界现状，他们部分是对的。我们被告知，年轻人必须上大学，因为我们的经济无法容纳未经训练的18岁年轻人。但失望的毕业生们正在了解到，它也无法再接纳一支由受过训练的22岁年轻人组成的队伍。
Some adventuresome educators and campus watchers have openly begun to suggest that college may not be the best, the proper, the only place for every young person after the completion of high school. We may have been looking at all those surveys upside down, it seems, and thinking of the rosy glow of our own remembered college experiences. Perhaps college does not make people intelligent (clever), ambitious, happy, liberal, or quick to learn things—maybe it is just the other way round, and intelligent, ambitious, happy, liberal, quick-learning people are only the ones who have been attracted to college in the first place. And perhaps all those successful college graduates would have been successful whether they had gone to college or not. This is heresy to those of us who have been brought up to believe that if little schooling is good, more has to be much better. But opposite evidence is beginning to mount up.
一些富有冒险精神的教育工作者和校园观察家已经公开表示，大学可能不是每个年轻人高中毕业后最好、合适、唯一的地方。我们可能一直在反复看待所有这些调查，并思考我们自己记忆中的大学经历所带来的美好光芒。也许大学并不能让人们变得聪明、有雄心、快乐、自由或快速学习——也许恰恰相反，聪明、有雄心、幸福、自由、快速学习的人只是最初被大学吸引的人。也许所有那些成功的大学毕业生，无论他们是否上过大学，都会成功。对于我们这些从小就相信，如果少受教育是好的，那么多受教育一定会更好的人来说，这是异端。但相反的证据开始增多。
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