第1836期阅读理解

The case for college has been accepted withoutquestion 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, andlearn to be more responsible citizens than those whodont go.

But college has never been able to work its magicfor everyone. And now that close to half our high school graduates are attending, those who dont fit the pattern are becoming more numerous, and more obvious. College graduates areselling shoes and driving taxis; college students interfere with each others experiments andwrite false letters of recommendation in the intense competition for admission to graduate school. Other find no stimulation in their studies, and drop outoften encouraged by college administrators.

Some observers say the fault is with the young people themselvesthey are spoiled andthey are expecting too much. But that is a condemnation of the students as a whole, anddoesnt explain all campus unhappiness. Others blame the state of the world, and they arepartly right. We have been told that young people have to go to college because our economy cant 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 watchers have openly begun to suggest that collegemay not be the best, the proper, the only place for every young person after the completion ofhigh school. We may have been looking at all those surveys and statistics upside down, itseems, and through the rosy glow of our own remembered college experiences. Perhaps collegedoesnt make people intelligent, ambitious, happy, liberal, or quick to learn thingsmay it is justthe other way around, and intelligent, ambitious, happy, liberal, quick-learning people are merelythe ones who have been attracted to college in the first place. And perhaps all those successfulcollege graduates would have been successful whether they had gone to college or not. This isheresy 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.