Colleges give prospective students very little information about how much money they can expect to earn in the job market. In part that’s because colleges may not want people to know, and in part it’s because such information is difficult and expensive to gather.
對于未來的學生可以在就業(yè)市場上賺到多少錢，院校提供的信息非常少，一部分原因是院校也許不希望別人知道這些信息，還有部分原因在于收集這些信息并不容易，成本又高。
Colleges are good at tracking down rich alumni to hit up for donations, but people who make little or no money are harder and less lucrative to find.
院校擅于聯(lián)系富有的校友為母校捐款，但賺錢少的校友不僅難于查找，而且這么做的效益也不高。
On Saturday, the federal government solved that problem by releasing a huge set of new data detailing the earnings of people who attended nearly every college and university in America. Although it abandonded efforts to rate the quality of colleges, the federal government matched data from the federal student financial aid system to federal tax returns.
上周六，美國聯(lián)邦政府解決了這個問題：他們公布了大量新數(shù)據(jù)，詳細列出了美國幾乎所有學院和大學的學生收入。聯(lián)邦政府沒有費心去給院校的質(zhì)量評級，而是把聯(lián)邦學生資助體系和聯(lián)邦納稅申報系統(tǒng)的數(shù)據(jù)進行了匹配。
The Department of Education was thus able to calculate how much money people who enrolled in individual colleges in 2001 and 2002 were earning 10 years later.
這樣一來，教育部就計算出了在2001年和2002年進入各所院校的學生，在10年后賺了多少錢。
On the surface, the trends aren’t surprising — students who enroll in wealthy, elite colleges earn more than those who do not. But the deeper that you delve into the data, the more clear it becomes how perilous the higher education market can be for students making expensive, important choices that don’t always pay off.
從表面上看，他們發(fā)現(xiàn)的趨勢并不出人意料——畢業(yè)于有錢的名牌大學的學生，收入比其他學生高。但越是深入研究這些數(shù)據(jù)，就越能清楚地看到，高等教育市場的風險變得何其巨大：學生們做出了代價高昂的重大選擇，卻并不一定能得到回報。
The national universities producing the top earners are no surprise: Harvard, M.I.T., Stanford and others that routinely top the annual U.S. News & World Report college rankings. The most troubling numbers show up far beneath the upper echelons of higher education.
收入最高的學生來自全國知名的高校，這并不出人意料，包括哈佛大學、麻省理工學院、斯坦福大學，以及其他幾所經(jīng)常排在《美國新聞與世界報道》(U.S. News & World Report)排行榜前列的大學。最令人不安的數(shù)字，來自那些排名遠遠低于第一梯隊的院校。
Elite institutions prop up the overall average earnings of college graduates nationwide. Although earnings of college graduates continue to outpace those of non-collegians by a significant margin, at some institutions, the earnings of students 10 years after enrollment are bleak.
精英教育機構(gòu)拉高了全國高校畢業(yè)生的總體平均收入。盡管大學畢業(yè)生的收入仍然遠超沒有讀過大學的人，但在一些院校，學生入學后10年的收入并不高。
The Department of Education calculated the percentage of students at each college who earned more than $25,000 per year, which is about what high school graduates earn. At hundreds of colleges, less than half of students met this threshold 10 years after enrolling.
教育部計算了各所院校年薪超過2.5萬美元（約合16萬元人民幣）的學生比例，2.5萬美元是高中畢業(yè)生通常的年薪水平。在數(shù)百所院校中，只有不到一半的學生在入學10年后，跨過了這道門檻。
The list includes a raft of barber academies, cosmetology schools and for-profit colleges that often leave students with few job prospects and mountains of debt.
這些院校包括大量的理發(fā)學院、美容學校和營利性院校，它們的學生往往就業(yè)前景慘淡，背負了大筆債務。
But some more well-known institutions weren’t far behind. At Bennington College in Vermont, over 48 percent of former students were earning less than $25,000 per year. A quarter were earning less than $10,600 per year. At Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, the median annual earnings were only $35,700. Results at the University of New Mexico were almost exactly the same.
但是，一些比較有名的院校也是如此。在佛蒙特州的本寧頓學院(Bennington College)，超過48%的學生在入學10年后，年收入低于2.5萬美元，四分之一低于1.06萬美元。在安南代爾哈得遜的巴德學院(Bard College)，學生的年收入中位數(shù)只有3.57萬美元。新墨西哥大學(University of New Mexico)的數(shù)字差不多也是一樣。
The data reveals how much money students are borrowing in exchange for earnings after graduation. While U.C.L.A. and Penn State are both prestigious public research universities, recent U.C.L.A. grads leave with about 30 percent less debt, even as their predecessors are earning about 30 percent more money than counterparts at Penn State. Harvard students borrow barely a quarter of what Brandeis students take on, and earn nearly twice as much.
這些數(shù)據(jù)也顯示出，學生們?yōu)榱藫Q取畢業(yè)后的收入借了多少錢。雖然加州大學洛杉磯分校(UCLA)和賓夕法尼亞州立大學(Penn State)都是久負盛名的研究型公立大學，但前者近期畢業(yè)的學生所背負的債務，比賓州立少30%，而UCLA早些年畢業(yè)的學生，收入約比賓州立高30%。哈佛學生借的錢，不足布蘭迪斯大學學生的四分之一，收入?yún)s是后者的近兩倍。
The return is unequal in other ways. There is an earnings gender gap at every top university. The size of the difference varies a great deal. At Duke, for example, women earned $93,100 per year on average, compared with $123,000 for men, a difference of $29,900.
從其他方面來看，收入并不均衡。每一所頂級高校在收入方面都存在性別差異。差異的大小相差懸殊。例如，在杜克大學，女性平均年收入9.31萬美元，而男性的薪水為12.3萬美元，兩者相差2.99萬美元。
At Princeton, men earned more and women earned less, for a difference of $47,700. Women who enrolled at Cornell earned more than women who enrolled at Yale.
在普林斯頓大學，男性掙得更多，女性掙得更少，差距達到了4.77萬美元?？的螤柎髮W的女畢業(yè)生比耶魯大學的女畢業(yè)生掙得多。
Defining higher education in purely economic terms risks exacerbating what some have described as the corporatization of the modern university. People get a lot more out of college than earnings potential. They learn to be better citizens and better human beings.
單從經(jīng)濟角度定義高等教育，可能會加劇一些人所說的現(xiàn)代大學的公司化的情況。人們在大學里得到的，遠遠不僅是收入前景。他們還會學到怎樣做一個更好的公民、更好的人。
The world needs dancers and poets along with the future investment bankers and tech entrepreneurs streaming out of elite schools.
世界需要精英學校涌現(xiàn)出的舞者、詩人，也需要未來的投資銀行家和科技創(chuàng)業(yè)者。
The problem is that the dancers and poets are paying the same, ever-rising tuition, even though the necessary cost of running a good poetry program is probably not much more than it was in earlier times when college tuition was much less expensive than it is today. And you can’t pay your student loans back with citizenship — only dollars will do.
問題在于舞者和詩人需要支付的學費與其他人一樣多，而且在不斷上漲，雖然開設一個好的詩歌項目所必需成本，可能并不比以前多很多，而當時大學學費要低得多。你不能用公民責任感來償還助學貸款——只有錢才行。
Colleges can ameliorate this problem by providing need-based financial aid to low-income students, reducing their debt burden and likelihood of loan default. The new data indicates that some colleges are more successful with this strategy than others.
大學可以通過為低收入學生按需提供經(jīng)濟支持，來減少他們的債務負擔和拖欠貸款的可能性，進而幫助改善這個問題。新的數(shù)據(jù)顯示，一些采取這種策略的大學，要比其他大學成功。
（內(nèi)容來自 紐約時報中英文網(wǎng)）
