从美国名牌高校毕业,你能挣多少钱?

发布时间：2015-10-10     来源：美国留学

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.

对于未来的学生可以在就业市场上赚到多少钱，院校提供的信息非常少，一部分原因是院校也许不希望别人知道这些信息，还有部分原因在于收集这些信息并不容易，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.

院校擅于联系富有的校友为母校捐款，但赚钱少的校友不仅难于查找，而且这么做的效益也不高。

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，美国联邦政府解决了这个问题：他们公布了大量新数据，详细列出了美国几乎所有学院和大学的学生收入。联邦政府没有费心去给院校的质量评级，而是把联邦学生资助体系和联邦纳税申报系统的数据进行了匹配。

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.

这样一来，教育部就计算出了在2001年和2002年进入各所院校的学生，在10年后赚了多少钱。

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.

从表面上看，他们发现的趋势并不出人意料——毕业于有钱的名牌大学的学生，收入比其他学生高。但越是深入研究这些数据，就越能清楚地看到，高等教育市场的风险变得何其巨大：学生们做出了代价高昂的重大选择，却并不一定能得到回报。

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.

收入最高的学生来自全国知名的高校，这并不出人意料，包括哈佛大学、麻省理工学院、斯坦福大学，以及其他几所经常排在《美国新闻与世界报道》(U.S. News & World Report)排行榜前列的大学。最令人不安的数字，来自那些排名远远低于第一梯队的院校。

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.

精英教育机构拉高了全国高校毕业生的总体平均收入。尽管大学毕业生的收入仍然远超没有读过大学的人，但在一些院校，学生入学后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.

教育部计算了各所院校年薪超过2.5万美元(约合16万元人民币)的学生比例，2.5万美元是高中毕业生通常的年薪水平。在数百所院校中，只有不到一半的学生在入学10年后，跨过了这道门槛。

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.

这些院校包括大量的理发学院、美容学校和营利性院校，它们的学生往往就业前景惨淡，背负了大笔债务。

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，一些比较有名的院校也是如此。在佛蒙特州的本宁顿学院(Bennington College)，超过48%的学生在入学10年后，年收入低于2.5万美元，四分之一低于1.06万美元。在安南代尔哈得逊的巴德学院(Bard College)，学生的年收入中位数只有3.57万美元。新墨西哥大学(University of New Mexico)的数字差不多也是一样。

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.

这些数据也显示出，学生们为了换取毕业后的收入借了多少钱。虽然加州大学洛杉矶分校(UCLA)和宾夕法尼亚州立大学(Penn State)都是久负盛名的研究型公立大学，但前者近期毕业的学生所背负的债务，比宾州立少30%，而UCLA早些年毕业的学生，收入约比宾州立高30%。哈佛学生借的钱，不足布兰迪斯大学学生的四分之一，收入却是后者的近两倍。

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.

从其他方面来看，收入并不均衡。每一所顶级高校在收入方面都存在性别差异。差异的大小相差悬殊。例如，在杜克大学，女性平均年收入9.31万美元，而男性的薪水为12.3万美元，两者相差2.99万美元。

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.

在普林斯顿大学，男性挣得更多，女性挣得更少，差距达到了4.77万美元。康奈尔大学的女毕业生比耶鲁大学的女毕业生挣得多。

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.

单从经济角度定义高等教育，可能会加剧一些人所说的现代大学的公司化的情况。人们在大学里得到的，远远不仅是收入前景。他们还会学到怎样做一个更好的公民、更好的人。

The world needs dancers and poets along with the future investment bankers and tech entrepreneurs streaming out of elite schools.

世界需要精英学校涌现出的舞者、诗人，也需要未来的投资银行家和科技创业者。

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.

问题在于舞者和诗人需要支付的学费与其他人一样多，而且在不断上涨，虽然开设一个好的诗歌项目所必需成本，可能并不比以前多很多，而当时大学学费要低得多。你不能用公民责任感来偿还助学贷款——只有钱才行。

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.

大学可以通过为低收入学生按需提供经济支持，来减少他们的债务负担和拖欠贷款的可能性，进而帮助改善这个问题。新的数据显示，一些采取这种策略的大学，要比其他大学成功。

(内容来自 纽约时报中英文网)

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