单选题
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The case for college has
been accepted without question for more than a generation. All high school
graduates Ought to go, says conventional wisdom and statistical evidence,
because college will help them earn more money, become "better" people, and
learn to be more responsible than those who don't go.
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 numerous and more obvious. College graduates are selling shoes
and driving taxis; college students interfere with each other's experiments and
write false letters of recommendation in the intense competition for admission
to graduate school. Others find no stimulation 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 expecting too
much. But that's a condemnation of the students as a whole and doesn't 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 can't absorb an army of untrained eighteen-year-olds. But disappointed
graduates are learning that it can no longer absorb an army of trained
twenty-two-year olds either.
Some adventuresome educators and
campus watchers have openly begun to suggest that college may not be the best,
the proper, or the only place for every young person after the completion of
high school. We may have been looking at all those surveys and statistics upside
down, it seems, and through the rosy glow of our own remembered college
experiences. Perhaps college doesn't make people intelligent, ambitious, happy,
liberal, or quick to learn things. Maybe it's just the other way around, and
intelligent, ambitious, happy; liberal, quick-learning people are merely 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 a little schooling is good, more has to be better. But
contrary evidence is beginning to mount up.