American higher education has a dropout problem. About one in three students who enroll in college never earn a degree. But a promising solution is staring us in the face: Schools with similar students often have very different graduation rates. This suggests that the problem isn’t the students — it’s the schools.
美国高等教育存在肄业问题，大约三分之一注册在案的学生都得不到学位。有一个急需解决方案的问题正摆在我们面前：生源类似的学校毕业率截然不同，这意味着问题不在学生而在学校。
Here we looked at 368 colleges arranged by what we would expect their graduation rates to be, based on the average for colleges with similar student bodies. That kind of variation is common. If struggling schools could learn some lessons from the high performers, tens of thousandsmore students could graduate from college each year.
这里我们根据生源类似大学的平均水平，研究了368所大学，这部分大学是根据预期毕业率排序。这些变化很常见，如果那些苦苦挣扎的大学能够从业内优秀者身上吸取教训，每年还会有数万名学生从大学毕业。
The chart above is based on an analysis done by The New York Times and the Urban Institute’s Center on Education Data and Policy. We undertook this project because the college-dropout crisis is a major contributor to American inequality. Many lower-income and middle-class students excel in high school only to falter in college. They then struggle to get good jobs. To create our expected graduation rates, we looked at the characteristics of a college’s students, including income, race, gender, age and test scores. On average, colleges have lower graduation rates when they enroll more lower-income students, more black and Latino students, more men, more older students and more students with low SAT or ACT scores.
上图是根据《纽约时报》和城市教育数据与政策研究中心的分析得出的，我们之所以进行这个项目是因为大学辍学危机是造成美国不平等的主要原因。许多低收入和中产阶级学生在高中成绩优异，但在大学却步步艰难。之后他们为了创造我们预期的毕业率，拼命去寻找一份好工作。我们研究了一所大学学生的特点，包括收入、种族、性别、年龄和考试成绩，平均而言，那些招收更多黑人学生、拉丁裔学生、男性、大龄学生、低SAT或ACT分数学生的学校毕业率更低。
We found that the list of top-performing colleges — those that exceed their expected six-year graduation rate — is diverse in almost every way. It spans colleges with expected graduation rates from 18 percent to 80 percent. It includes private colleges, like the University of La Verne, in Southern California, as well as historically black colleges like North Carolina Central and Fayetteville State. It also includes big public universities like San Diego State, New Hampshire, Virginia Tech and several branches of the State University of New York.
我们发现，毕业率最高的大学——那些超过六年预期毕业率的大学——几乎在所有方面各不相同。它涵盖了预期毕业率从18%到80%的大学，包括南加州拉韦恩大学、北卡罗莱纳州和费耶特维尔州黑人学院等的私立学校，以及圣地亚哥州、新罕布什尔州、弗吉尼亚理工、纽约州立几个分校等的公立大学。
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