导读：本篇文章谈论的是大学教育：大学如何培养学生呢？“精英统制”这种说法到底好不好呢？接下来，这篇2000多字的文章将带你一起探讨大学的精英教育模式。本文配有相当详细的注解及段落大意，希望小伙伴们耐下心来，好好欣赏。

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, bucolic(乡村的、田园的) campuses and raucous parties (it doesn't even have dorms), and, until recently, academic credibility.
（由当今现象引出疑问：为什么硬件条件不好的纽约城市大学会受到很多学生的青睐？）

1. reckoning:N.估算；（常用单数）a time when sb. Actions will be judged to be right or wrong and they may be punished.
2. been flooded with：充斥着
3. raucous：sounding loud and rough.
4. academic credibility:学术诚信

A primary draw at CUNY is a programme 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 honours programme 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%.
（原因是这所大学为聪明的学生提供免费教育。）

5. five top+n.:前五名的
6. costly: adj. 价钱高的
7. a stipend of :助学金、奖学金
8. general expenses:日常开支

Admission has nothing to do with being an athlete, or a child of an alumnus, 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.
（申请该项目的唯一标准是：聪明）

9. alumnus: 校友
10. has nothing to do with：与……无关
11. criteria:pl. (批评、评判的)标准
12. aggrieved: feeling that you have been treated unfairly, feeling upset and angry.
13. ethnic: 种族的

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（极好的） parable of meritocracy revisited.
（描述该项目得到的成绩：学生们标准化考试平均分位占全美最高分的7%。 ）

14. Standardise：使合乎规格，使标准化
15. break into:成功进入
16. parable: (圣经等中的)寓言故事
17. meritocracy revisited: 重提的精英管理制度
18. transfermation:改革

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 gruelling standards.
（开始谈纽约城市大学的历史。20世纪60年代以前，该免费大学申请标准很高。）

19. tertiary education：高等教育
20. meet gruelling standards：需要花费很大力气才能达到的标准

City's golden era came in the last century, when America's best known colleges restricted the number of Jewish(犹太人的、信犹太教的) 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); Hunter, its affiliated former women's college, produced two, and a sister branch in Brooklyn produced one. City educated（培养） Felix Frankfurter, a pivotal figure on the Supreme Court (class of 1902), Ira Gershwin (1918), Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine (1934) and Robert Kahn, an architect of the internet (1960). A left-wing place in the 1930s and 1940s, City spawned many of mouthe neo-conservative intellectuals who would later swing to the right（右翼党）, such as Irving Kristol (class of 1940, extra-curricular activity: anti-war club), Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer.
(举一系列杰出的人证明纽约城市的免费教育有利于培养管理学生。）

21. Be teeming with:to be full of people, animals, etc. moving around
22. Laureates:荣誉获得者
    Poet Laureate:桂冠诗人
    Nobel laureate: 诺贝尔奖获得者
23. Admit students:接收学生入学
24. at exactly the time：恰恰就是这个时间
25. affiliated college：附属学院
26. polio vaccine：脊髓灰质炎疫苗
27. a pivotal figure：关键性的人物
28. spanw: (disapproving) to cause sth to develop or be produced
29. neo-conservative:新保守派
30. intellectual:受到良好教育的人，从事脑力劳动的人
31. swing (from A) to B:改变意见等
32. extra-curricular activity：课程外的活动

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（批评家） 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（抗议） 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.
(但后来，出了问题，因为申请标准降低了。)

33. Drop standard: 降低标准
34. Demography：人口统计学
35. Partly to do with:部分与……有关
36. earnest muddle headedness：
37. minority students：少数民族学生
38. Hispanic：拉美裔的
39. be squared with：（使）与（意见、事实、情况）一致
40. be tweaked:（被动） 稍稍调整机器、系统等
41. upheaval: a big change that causes a lot of confusion, worry and problems

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.
（教学质量下降，导致免费时代终结。）

42. collapse: to fail suddenly or completely
43. in effect:事实上
44. impose fees: 征收费用
45. serve ... purpose: to be useful to sb. in achieving or satisfying sth.
46. Muddle：(局面) 一团糟

By 1997, seven out of ten first-year students in the CUNY system were failing at least one remedial test in reading, writing or maths (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?’ ”
（如此引发对教育的思考：我们该提供什么样的教育？）

47. Remedial test: 补考
48. Commission Sb. Sth. :正式要求某人某事
49. Commitment：已承诺的事或不得不做的事
50. Conclude: to decide or believe sth. as a result of what you have heard or seen.

Using the report as ammunition, profound reforms were pushed through by New York's then mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, and another alumnus, Herman Badillo (1951), America's first Puerto Rican congressman. A new head of CUNY was appointed. Matthew Goldstein, a mathematician (1963), has shifted the focus back towards higher standards amid considerable controversy.（争论）
(讨论的焦点是再次提高入学标准。)

51. Ammunition: information that can be used against another person in an argument
52. Be pushed through by sb. : 某人（或政府）正式批准、通过……
53. Alumnus: pl. former male student of school
54. Congressman: 国会议员
55. Shift the focus: 改变（态度、意见）焦点
56. Amid :在……之中（尤指引起兴奋或担忧的事）

For instance, by 2001, all of CUNY's 11 “senior” colleges (ie, ones that offer full four-year courses) had stopped offering remedial education. This prompted howls from the teaching faculty, who said it would “create a ghetto-like separation between levels of colleges”, keeping black and Hispanic students out of the best schools. In fact, the racial composition of the senior schools, monitored obsessively by critics（批评家）, has remained largely unchanged: one in four students at the senior colleges is black, one in five is Latino. A third have ties to Puerto Rico, Jamaica, China and the Dominican Republic.
(停止加试教育引起某些老师的不满。)

57. remedial education: education to improve a person’s ability to read, write, or do mathematics, especially when students find these things difficult.
58. “senior” colleges:高级学院
59. Prompted(立即的) howls：a loud cry showing that you are in pain, angry, amused, etc.
60. The teaching faculty：教职员
61. ghetto: 相同种族或背景的聚居地，同其他人分隔开，通常很拥挤且生活条件不好。
62. Latino：（居住在美国的）拉美裔
63. Have ties to: 与……有很强的联系
64. Be monitored obsessively by：受到过分关注
65. Puerto Rico：波多黎各（有自治权的美国殖民地）
66. Jamaica：牙买加

Admissions standards have been raised. Students applying to（申请（入学）） CUNY's senior colleges now need respectable scores on either a national, state or CUNY test, and the admissions criteria for the honours programme are the toughest in the university's history. Contrary to what Mr Goldstein's critics（pl.） predicted, higher standards have attracted more students, not fewer: this year, enrolment at CUNY is at a record high. There are also anecdotal signs that CUNY is once again picking up bright(聪明的) locals, especially in science. One advanced biology class at City now has twice as many students as it did in the late 1990s. Last year, two students, both born in the Soviet Union, won Rhodes scholarships, and a Bronx native（土著） who won the much sought-after Intel Science Prize is now in the honours programme.
(入学标准提高后带来了一些好的方面。)

66. Admissions standards：入学标准
67. respectable scores: 相当大的分数
68. Contrary to:跟……相反
69. Pick up locals: 收取（挑选）当地学生
70. There are also anecdotal signs that：也有小道消息称
71. the much sought-after prize：(因稀有或质优)受欢迎的， 抢手的奖牌

All this should not imply that CUNY is out of the woods. Much of it looks run down. CUNY's annual budget of $1.7 billion has stayed largely unchanged, even as student numbers have risen. With New York City's finances still precarious, city and state support for the university has fallen by more than one-third since 1991 in real terms. It has, however, begun to bring in private money.
(但纽约城市大学仍面临一些困难。)

72. Out of the woods: (喻)脱离困境clear of danger or difficulty
73. looks run down:每况愈下
74. precarious finances: unsteady; unsafe 不稳定的财政
75. support has fallen: 支持下降

A new journalism school will open in the autumn, helped by a $4m grant from the Sulzberger family, who control the New York Times, and led by Business Week's former editor, Steve Shepard (class of 1961). Efforts to raise a $1.2 billion endowment have passed the half-way mark, helped by (formerly estranged) alumni. Intel's former chairman, Andrew Grove, who graduated from City in 1960 as a penniless Hungarian immigrant, donated $26m (about 30% of City's operating budget) to the engineering school, calling his alma mater “a veritable American dream machine”.
(学校得到校友的资助)

76. Journalism school:新闻学院
77. Raise endowment:募集捐赠基金
78. passed the half-way mark：成功了一半
79. veritable：being truly so called; real or genuine:
80. alumni：单数N. 男校友
81. Hungarian：匈牙利人（的）

There are broader lessons to draw from CUNY, especially to do with creating opportunities in higher education for the poor. Currently, only 3% of the students in America's top colleges come from families in the lowest income quartile and only 10% from the bottom half, according to a study by Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose for the Century Foundation. Most students are relatively well-off, and their numbers include plenty of racial minorities who receive preferential status independent of their economic circumstances.
(该学校有些管理经验值得学习。)

83. the lesson to be/can be drawn (from sth)：从……吸取教训
84. quartile 经常和the lowest income连用,表示低收入的家庭和人群
    the bottom half.下半部分,社会底层,收入中等以下的人群、家庭
85. well-off：有钱的
86. preferential status：特权

For all its imperfections, CUNY's model of low tuition fees and high standards offers a different approach. And its recent history may help to dispel the myth that high academic standards deter students and donors. “Elitism”, Mr Goldstein contends, “is not a dirty word.”
(观点明确：提高入学标准，降低学费)

87. imperfections：不完美、瑕疵
88. dispel the myth：drive sth. Off
    Myth: thing, person, etc that is imaginary, fictitious or impossible
    ie, The rich uncle of whom he boasts is only a myth.
89. deter students and donors:震慑学生和捐赠人
    To prevent or discourage the occurrence of an action, as by means of fear or doubt:
90. elitism: 精英优越论,认为在某些类或群体中的特定人或成员因其明显的超于常人的优点（例如在智力、社会地位或经济来源方面）所应该享受较好的待遇