ASK just about any high school senior or junior — or their parents — and they'll tell you that getting into a selective college is harder than it used to be. They're right about that. But the reasons for the newfound difficulty are not well understood.

如果你去问任何高中高年级生或低年级生，抑或他们的家长，他们会告诉你，进入一所知名的大学比以前更难了。他们这么说是对的。不过，人们并不充分了解带来这种新难题的原因。

Population growth plays a role, but the number of teenagers is not too much higher than it was 30 years ago, when the youngest baby boomers were still applying to college. And while many more Americans attend college than in the past, most of the growth has occurred at colleges with relatively¹ few resources and high dropout² rates, which bear little resemblance to the elites⁴.

人口增长是一个原因，不过青少年的人口比30年前高不了多少，那个时候，最年轻的婴儿潮一代仍在申读大学。和过去相比，现在有更多美国人进入大学，然而入学率的增长大多出现在那些资源相对较少，辍学率相对较高的的院校，这些院校和顶尖学府几无相似之处。

So what else is going on? One overlooked factor is that top colleges are admitting fewer American students than they did a generation ago. Colleges have globalized over that time, deliberately⁵ increasing the share of their student bodies that come from overseas and leaving fewer slots for applicants⁶ from the United States.

那么，还有什么原因在发挥作用？一个被忽略的因素是一流院校录取的美国学生比一代人之前要少。这一代的时间里，大学已经变得全球化了，它们刻意增加了海外生源的比例，给本国申请生留下的份额变少了。

For American teenagers, it really is harder to get into Harvard — or Yale, Stanford, Brown, Boston College or many other elite³ colleges — than it was when today's 40-year-olds or 50-year-olds were applying. The number of spots filled by American students at Harvard, after adjusting for the size of the teenage population nationwide, has dropped 27 percent since 1994. At Yale and Dartmouth, the decline has been 24 percent. At Carleton, it's 22 percent. At Notre Dame⁷ and Princeton, it is 14 percent.

对美国青少年而言，申请进入哈佛大学(Harvard)、或是耶鲁(Yale)、斯坦福(Stanford)、布朗大学(Brown)、波士顿大学(Boston College)及其他许多名校，真的要比今天40多岁或50多岁的那代人申请进入这些大学时更困难。在根据全国青少年人口进行调整后，哈佛大学录取的美国学生数量自1994年以来下降了27%。耶鲁大学和达特茅斯学院(Dartmouth)录取的美国学生下降了24%。卡尔顿学院(Carleton College)的比例下降了22%。马里兰圣母学院(Notre Dame)和普林斯顿大学(Princeton)的比例均下降了14%。

The frenzy⁸ over admissions at top colleges can seem nonstop: the last-minute flurry as accepted students decide by May 1 where to attend, the Supreme⁹ Court battles over affirmative action, the applications that some high school juniors have already begun writing. Yet the globalization of these colleges has been largely missing from the discussion.

一流学府的入学名额所引发的疯狂状况似乎永无止境，随着被录取的学生在5月1日前决定去哪所学校就读，随着最高法院(Supreme Court)就平权行动展开较量，随着一些高中高年级生开始撰写申请信，这场狂热陷入了最后一分钟的忙乱。然而，顶尖院校的全球化问题，基本上一直被此类讨论遗漏在外。

This globalization obviously brings some big benefits. It has exposed American students to perspectives that our proudly parochial country often does not provide in childhood. "It would be a lesser¹⁰ education for them if they didn't get a chance to interact with some international students," as William Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions at Harvard since 1986, told me. The trend also fits with the long American tradition of luring¹¹ some of the world's most talented people here. Many international students who come for college never leave. Some of them found companies or make other contributions to society.

全球化显然带来了某些巨大的好处。他让美国学生接触到了国际视野，我们这个眼界狭隘的骄傲国家往往不会在孩提时代给儿童提供这种视野。自1986年以来一直负责哈佛大学招生工作的威廉·菲茨西蒙斯(William Fitzsimmons)对我说，“如果他们没有机会和一些国际学生互动，那他们受到的教育就会缩水。”这种趋势还和美国吸纳全球一些最具天分的人才的长期传统相契合。许多进入美国院校的国际学生留了下来。其中一些人在美国成立了公司，或者对社会做出了其它贡献。

Yet the way in which American colleges have globalized comes with costs, too. For one thing, the rise in foreign students has complicated the colleges' stated efforts to make their classes more economically diverse. Foreign students often receive scant¹² financial aid and tend to be from well-off families. For another thing, the country's most selective colleges have effectively shrunk as far as American students are concerned, during the same span that many students and their parents are spending more time obsessing¹³ over getting into one.

然而，美国院校全球化的方式也伴有一定的成本。首先，留学生的增多让院校针对学生经济背景多元化的公开举措变得更麻烦。留学生得到的经济援助甚少，他们往往来自富裕家庭。其次，就美国学生而言，本国最出色的院校基本上缩减了规模，于是在这段时间里，许多学生和家长都在耗费更多的时间，冥思苦想着如何进入一所出色的院校。

Many numbers for individual colleges here come from Noodle, a company that provides advice on education decisions. I combined the numbers with census¹⁴ data on the number of 18- to 21-year-olds in the United States to examine what share of college-age Americans in four different years — 1984, 1994, 2004 and 2012 — were attending various elite colleges.

本文中和单个院校相关的大量数据，均来自Noodle公司，这是一家提供教育决策咨询的公司。我把这些数字和美国人口普查中18到21岁的人口数据联系起来，查看了在1984、1994、2004和2012年这四个不同的年份，该年龄段的美国学生加入本国多所一流院校的比例。

The share for any individual college is minuscule¹⁵, of course. In 2012, about 33 out of every 100,000 American 18- to 21-year-olds were attending Harvard, down from 45 per 100,000 in 1994. These changes in the share tell you how much harder, or easier, admission has become for American teenagers on average. Between 1984 and 1994, it became easier at many colleges. The college-age population in this country fell during that time to 14.1 million in 1994 from 16.5 million in 1984, and the number of foreign students was relatively stable.

当然了，单看任何一家大学，这一比例都微乎其微。2012年，18到21岁的美国学生中，每10万人中仅有约33人上哈佛，而1994年的数据是每10万里有45人。这些比例变化能告诉我们，美国高中生平均的大学录取情况变难或变易的程度。从1984年到1994年，许多高等学府的入学都变简单了。在此期间，美国的大学适龄人口从1984年的1650万下滑至1994年的1410万，而海外学生人数相对平稳。

I attended college in the early 1990s, and these numbers made me realize how easy the application process was for me and my peers, relative to almost any other time over the past half century. By the 2000s, the so-called echo boom in births had increased the number of college-age Americans. It reached 17.9 million in 2012. The number of foreign students was growing at the same time. They now constitute close to 10 percent of the student body at many selective colleges, nearly double the level of the early 1990s.

我本人是在90年代初上的大学，而这些数字让我意识到，与过去半个世纪的其他任何时段相比，自己与同龄人的大学申请过程是多么地容易。到了本世纪的前10年，所谓的“回声潮世代”增加了美国的大学适龄人口。2012年，这一数字达到了1790万。与此同时，海外学生人数也在攀升。到了今天，许多顶尖学府的外国学生占到学生总数的近10%，是90年代初的水平的几乎两倍。

The result is those big declines in the number of available seats for any given American teenager. Only colleges that have rapidly expanded their student bodies, like Columbia and the University of Chicago, have avoided the pattern.

结果，对任何美国高中生而言，大学空缺均大幅下滑。只有快速扩招的高等院校，比如哥伦比亚大学和芝加哥大学(University of Chicago)，才避免了这一规律。

Obviously, the averages do not apply equally across the board. For students from the Northeast applying to elite colleges in the region, college admissions have probably become even more difficult in recent decades than these statistics suggest. Not only have colleges globalized, they have also become less regional, admitting more students from states like North Carolina, Texas and Washington.

显然，平均状况并不会均摊到每个角落。对申请东北部著名学府的本地区学生而言，近几十年的录取情况很可能比上述数据显示得更加惨烈。各大院校不仅更为全球化，而且也减少了地区色彩，更多地录取来自北卡罗来纳、德克萨斯和华盛顿等州的学生。

To many individual students, the newfound difficulty probably doesn't cause much harm (even if it does cause angst). Over the last 20 years, several large colleges, like N.Y.U. and the University of Southern California, have improved markedly, effectively increasing the number of seats on elite campuses, Noodle has noted¹⁶.

对许多学生个体而言，这种新增的难度很可能无伤大雅（尽管的确会导致焦虑）。Noodle公司指出，过去20年间，包括纽约大学(NYU)和南加州大学(University of Southern California)在内的几家大型院校进步显著，实际上增加了一流大学的位置。

And there is still scant evidence that the selectivity of the college one attends matters much. Students with similar SAT scores who attended colleges of different selectivity — say, Penn and Penn State — had statistically¹⁷ identical incomes in later years, according to research by the economists¹⁸ Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger.

而且，仍然没有什么证据表明，人们所上高等院校的顶尖程度真有多大意义。根据经济学家史黛西·戴尔(Stacy Dale)和艾伦·克鲁格(Alan Krueger)所做的研究，拥有相似SAT分数的学生，就算上了水准不一的学校——比如宾大与宾州州立——后来的收入在统计学上也没有差别。

THERE was one exception, though: low-income students, who did seem to benefit from attending an elite college. Maybe they benefited more from the social contacts they made there or were more likely to drop out if they did not attend a top college.

不过，其中还是存在一种例外：来自低收入家庭的学生，似乎的确能从上一流学府中受益。也许，他们能从此类学校的社会关系中更多地获益，或者是因为，如果没去顶尖学府，他们退学的可能性更大。

Either way, the research underscores a problem with the way colleges have globalized. With only a handful of exceptions (including Harvard, Amherst, M.I.T. and Yale), colleges have not tried hard to recruit an economically diverse group of foreign students. The students instead have become a revenue source.

无论是哪种原因，研究结果都突显了大学全球化过程中的一个问题。除了少数例外（包括哈佛、阿默斯特、麻省理工和耶鲁），许多大学并没有尝试录取更多来自不同经济背景的外国学生，而是把外国学生当做了一个收入来源。

Sarah Turner and Kelli Bird, University of Virginia economists, have found that the enrollment¹⁹ of undergraduate foreign students fluctuates with the economic growth and exchange rates of those students' countries of origin. The pattern is much stronger among undergraduates than doctoral students — a sign that the undergraduates' families are paying their way.

弗吉尼亚大学的经济学家莎拉·特纳(Sarah Turner)和凯利·伯德(Kelli Bird)发现，大学本科外国学生的录取数量随着学生原籍国家的经济增长和汇率的变化而出现波动。这个规律在本科生中比在博士研究生中更加明显——这意味着，这些本科学生的学费由家里负担。

In recent years, college administrators²⁰ have repeatedly claimed that enrolling²¹ a more economically diverse group of students is a top priority. But their actions don't always match their words. While some have made progress, the students at many remain overwhelmingly affluent²². On average, about 15 percent of students at elite colleges receive Pell grants, which as a rule of thumb go to students in the bottom half of the income distribution.

最近几年，高校的管理人员曾多次表示，将重视录取不同经济状况的学生。但他们并没有总是说到做到。尽管一些学校取得了进展，许多学校的大部分学生仍然非常富裕。平均来看，顶尖学府的学生中，约15%获得了佩尔助学金(Pell)，根据经验，该项助学金一般由家庭收入低于中值的学生获得。

Foreign students — typically well-off ones — have become another group that college admissions offices have decided²³ should be well represented in every freshman²⁴ class, along with "legacy²⁵" applicants (the children of alumni), varsity athletes and underrepresented minorities. A large fraction of these groups comes from high-income families. And all of them, along now with students from around the world, are a higher priority for colleges than poor students.

外国学生——一般是富裕学生——已经成为大学招生办眼中又一个应该获得良好比例的群体，这种群体还包括，校友子女申请人、体育生，以及比例过少的少数族裔。这些群体中很大一部分来自高收入家庭。而他们中的所有人，现在又加上了来自世界各地的外国学生，对高校的重要性都要高于贫困生。

Low-income applicants are left to compete for the remaining slots with applicants who have the highest test scores, most impressive extracurricular activities and most eloquent²⁶ essays.

低收入的申请人只能与分数最高、课外活动最突出和话题作文最有说服力的学生竞争剩下的名额。

The globalization of elite colleges, then, is a fitting case study of how higher education has transformed itself in the last half century. After decades of being dominated by male students coming from a narrow network of prep schools, these schools have become a patchwork²⁷ of diversity — gender²⁸, race, religion and now geography. Underneath²⁹ the surface, though, that patchwork still has some common threads.

因此，顶尖大学的全球化是高等教育过去半个世纪自我转型的一个恰当的例子。在被来自少数固定预科学校的男学生主宰了几十年之后，这些一流高校已经成为多元化的万花筒——性别、种族、宗教，现在还包括地域。不过，在多元化的表面之下，这个万花筒里的图案仍然具有一些共同的线条。