问答题
The case for college has been accepted without
question for more than a generation. {{U}} {{U}} 1 {{/U}}
{{/U}}{{U}}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 citizens than those who
don't go.{{/U}} 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.
{{U}} {{U}} 2 {{/U}} {{/U}}{{U}}Others find no stimulation in
their studies, and drop out -- often encouraged by college
administrators.{{/U}} Some observers say the fault is with the
young people themselves -- they are spoiled and they are 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. {{U}}
{{U}} 3 {{/U}} {{/U}}{{U}}But disappointed graduates are learning that
it can no longer absorb an army of trained twenty-two-year-olds,
either.{{/U}} {{U}} {{U}} 4 {{/U}} {{/U}}{{U}}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.{{/U}} 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. {{U}} {{U}} 5 {{/U}} {{/U}}{{U}}And perhaps all
those successful college graduates would have been successful whether they had
gone to college or not.{{/U}} 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 much better.
But contrary evidence is beginning to mount up.