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  3. For America’s colleges, January is a month of reckoning. Most applications for the next academic year beginning in the autumn ha

For America’s colleges, January is a month of reckoning. Most applications for the next academic year beginning in the autumn ha

admin2011-03-10  38
问题   For America’s colleges, January is a month of reckoning. Most applications for the next academic year beginning in the autumn have to be made by the end of December, so a university’s popularity is put to an objective standard: how many people want to attend. One of the more unlikely offices to have been flooded with mail is that of the City University of New York (CUNY), a public college that lacks, among other things, a famous sports team, pastoral campuses and boisterous parties (it doesn’t even have dorms), and, until recently, academic credibility.
   A primary draw at CUNY is a programmer for particularly clever students, launched in 2001. Some 1, 100 of the 60,000 students at CUNY’s five top schools receive a rare thing in the costly world of American colleges: free education. Those accepted by CUNY’s honors programmer pay no tuition fees; instead they receive a stipend of $7, 500 (to help with general expenses) and a laptop computer. Applications for early admissions into next year’s programme are up 70%.
   Admission has nothing to do with being an athlete, or a child of an alunmus, or having an influential sponsor, or being a member of a particularly aggrieved ethnic group—criteria that are increasingly important at America’s elite colleges. Most of the students who apply to the honours programme come from relatively poor families, many of them immigrant ones. All that CUNY demands is that these students be diligent and clever.
   Last year, the average standardised test score of this group was in the top 7% in the country. Among the rest of CUNY’s students averages are lower, but they are now just breaking into the top third (compared with the bottom third in 1997). CUNY does not appear alongside Harvard and Stanford on lists of America’s top colleges, but its recent transformation offers a neat parable of meritocracy revisited.
   Until the 1960s, a good case could be made that the best deal in American tertiary education was to be found not in Cambridge or Palo Alto, but in Harlem, at a small public school called City College, the core of CUNY. America’s first free municipal university, founded in 1847, offered its services to everyone bright enough to meet its grueling standards.
   City’s golden era came in the last century, when America’s best known colleges restricted the number of Jewish students they would admit at exactly the time when New York was teeming with the bright children of poor Jewish immigrants. In 1933—54 City produced nine future Nobel laureates, including the 2005 winner for economics, Robert Aumann (who graduated in 1950).
   What went wrong? Put simply, City dropped its standards. It was partly to do with demography, partly to do with earnest muddle headedness. In the 1960s, universities across the country faced intense pressure to admit more minority students. Although City was open to all races, only a small number of black and Hispanic students passed the strict tests (including a future secretary of state, Colin Powell). That, critics decided, could not be squared with City’s mission to "serve all the citizens of New York". At first the standards were tweaked, but this was not enough, and in 1969 massive student protests shut down City’s campus for two weeks. Faced with upheaval, City scrapped its admissions standards altogether. By 1970, almost any student who graduated from New York’s high schools could attend.
   The quality of education collapsed. At first, with no barrier to entry, enrolment climbed, but in 1976 the city of New York, which was then in effect bankrupt, forced CUNY to impose tuition fees. An era of free education was over, and a university which had once served such a distinct purpose joined the muddle of America’s lower-end education.
   By 1997, seven out of ten first-year students in the CUNY system were failing at least one remedial test in reading, writing or moths ( meaning that they had not learnt it to high-school standard). A report commissioned by the city in 1999 concluded that "Central to CUNY’s historic mission is a commitment to provide broad access, but its students’ high drop-out rates and low graduation rates raise the question: Access to what?"  
The paragraph that follows the text is probably about
选项 A、CUNY’s reforms.
B、CUNY’s fate.
C、CUNY’s commitment.
D、CUNY’s mission.
答案A
解析 结构题。本文前四段指出CUNY吸引大批申请者的原因：a programme for particularly clever students，launched in 2001。提到城市大学的录取标准是All that CUNY demands is that these students be diligent and clever。第五段开始回顾该大学的历史。20世纪60年代以前，它是美国高等教育学府中管理最好的大学。第七段通过一个问句What went wrong?引出对20世纪60年代该大学面临的问题的说明。由于彻底废除了所有入学标准，教学质量骤然下降，导致了第八段末的结果：城市大学成为美国的低端教育。最后一段对当时CUNY的教育现状进行说明，末句中的students’ high drop-out rates and low graduation rates这种情况引起了人们思考“Access to what?”显然对“提供什么教育?”这个问题思考的结果就是进行改革，而改革必然会出现文章前四段提到的推出honours programmes的策略，从而达到教育质量上升这种结果。[A]符合英文篇章行文特点，故为答案。
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