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(Another day in paradise)
发表于 2017-3-24 01:14
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转: 你所不知的藤校招生规则演变
你所不知的藤校招生规则演变【1】
2017-03-22 翻译：Sea bear 东岸之声
编辑语
这篇文章来自《纽约客》杂志。Malcolm Gladwell是畅销书作家。这篇文章是十二年前写的。作者从他申报加拿大大学的经历与常春藤盟校招生的不同，来讲述常春藤盟校招生的规则和招生过程的历史演变。现在我们一起重温这篇旧文，也许对我们了解藤校会有新的启示。
在此，特别感谢Sea bear为此文的翻译工作付出的时间和劳动。
I applied to college one evening, after dinner, in the fall of my senior year in high school. College applicants in Ontario, in those days, were given a single sheet of paper which listed all the universities in the province. It was my job to rank them in order of preference. Then I had to mail the sheet of paper to a central college-admissions office. The whole process probably took ten minutes. My school sent in my grades separately. I vaguely remember filling out a supplementary two-page form listing my interests and activities. There were no S.A.T. scores to worry about, because in Canada we didn’t have to take the S.A.T.s. I don’t know whether anyone wrote me a recommendation. I certainly never asked anyone to. Why would I? It wasn’t as if I were applying to a private club.
我申请大学是在高三一个秋天的晚饭后。当时在加拿大的安大略省，每个申请者都有一张表，表上列出了安大略省的所有大学。我要做的就是按我自己的喜欢程度，把要申请的大学排列一下，然后把这表纸寄到省高校录取中心办公室。整个过程大概只要十分钟。我的成绩由我的高中单独寄去。依稀记得我填写了两页附表列出了我的兴趣和（课外）活动。我无需担心SAT考分，因为在加拿大我们不需要考SAT。我不知道是否有任何人帮我写过推荐信。反正我不记得我请过任何人帮我写推荐信。为什么需要推荐信呢？我又不是在申请一个私人俱乐部。
I put the University of Toronto first on my list, the University of Western Ontario second, and Queen’s University third. I was working off a set of brochures that I’d sent away for. My parents’ contribution consisted of my father’s agreeing to drive me one afternoon to the University of Toronto campus, where we visited the residential college I was most interested in. I walked around. My father poked his head into the admissions office, chatted with the admissions director, and—I imagine—either said a few short words about the talents of his son or (knowing my father) remarked on the loveliness of the delphiniums in the college flower beds. Then we had ice cream. I got in.
在我想去的大学中，我把多伦多大学列为第一位，西安大略大学第二，女皇大学第三。我在填写一些要寄出去的小册子。家长为我做的就是我父亲同意开车带我去多伦多大学校园，在那里参观我最感兴趣的新生住宿区。我随便走走。我父亲探头探脑地走进录取办公室，和录取官聊起来了。根据我对我父亲的了解， 估计他不是在美言他儿子才华就是在称赞校园花圃里的飞燕草的可爱。然后我们吃了冰激淋。我就（这样）进了（多伦多大学）。
Am I a better or more successful person for having been accepted at the University of Toronto, as opposed to my second or third choice? It strikes me as a curious question. In Ontario, there wasn’t a strict hierarchy of colleges. There were several good ones and several better ones and a number of programs—like computer science at the University of Waterloo—that were world-class. But since all colleges were part of the same public system and tuition everywhere was the same (about a thousand dollars a year, in those days), and a B average in high school pretty much guaranteed you a spot in college, there wasn’t a sense that anything great was at stake in the choice of which college we attended. The issue was whether we attended college, and—most important—how seriously we took the experience once we got there. I thought everyone felt this way. You can imagine my confusion, then, when I first met someone who had gone to Harvard.
There was, first of all, that strange initial reluctance to talk about the matter of college at all—a glance downward, a shuffling of the feet, a mumbled mention of Cambridge. “Did you go to Harvard?” I would ask. I had just moved to the United States. I didn’t know the rules. An uncomfortable nod would follow. Don’t define me by my school, they seemed to be saying, which implied that their school actually could define them. And, of course, it did. Wherever there was one Harvard graduate, another lurked not far behind, ready to swap tales of late nights at the Hasty Pudding, or recount the intricacies of the college-application essay, or wonder out loud about the whereabouts of Prince So-and-So, who lived down the hall and whose family had a place in the South of France that you would not believe. In the novels they were writing, the precocious and sensitive protagonist always went to Harvard; if he was troubled, he dropped out of Harvard; in the end, he returned to Harvard to complete his senior thesis. Once, I attended a wedding of a Harvard alum in his fifties, at which the best man spoke of his college days with the groom as if neither could have accomplished anything of greater importance in the intervening thirty years. By the end, I half expected him to take off his shirt and proudly display the large crimson “H” tattooed on his chest. What is this “Harvard” of which you Americans speak so reverently?
相对于我的第二位和第三位选择，我是否因为被多伦多大学录取而成为一个更好更成功的人呢？这是我心里一直嘀咕的问题。在安省，大学没有严格的分档次。有一些好大学，有一些相对更好些，还有一些世界级的专业，比如滑铁卢大学的计算机。 但是因为所有的大学都是属于同一个公立大学系统，学费也都一样 （那时才几千元一年），一个高中成绩平均为B的学生基本能保证进大学。从来没有觉得挑选去哪一所大学上学是一件很重要的事。当时我们考虑的是要不要上大学，更主要的是，我们是否很看重在学校里的体验。我一直以为大家都是一样认为的。直到有一天我遇到了一个哈佛毕业生。你们可以想象我的错愕。首先，在谈论大学的时候有一种奇怪的勉强感觉，垂目扫一眼，挪挪脚，含糊地提一下剑桥（波士顿的一个区，哈佛所在地）。我问他，你是哈佛的？那时我刚到美国，不懂得规矩。他不自然地点了下头。他似乎在对我说不要以我的母校来判定我的水平， 其实又在暗示我他上的学校事实上可以表示他的水平。那是肯定的。在哪里只要有一个哈佛毕业的，不远处就会有另一个哈佛的，谈论着哪些深夜发生在Hasty Pudding(哈佛戏剧俱乐部) 俱乐部的故事，回忆大学入学申请论文的复杂，或者会大声询问，那个住在走廊另一端的什么王子现在在哪里，他家住在法国南部一个不可思议的地方。他们所写的小说中， 那些早熟灵敏的主角总是上哈佛的， 如果他有了麻烦，就从哈佛辍学， 最后他又回到哈佛完成他的毕业论文。有一次我参加了一个五十多岁哈佛校友的婚礼，伴郎提起他跟新郎一起在哈佛的那些日子时，似乎觉得如果不是哈佛的那段经历，他俩可能会在这毕业后三十年里一事无成。到最后，我差点以为他会脱掉他的衬衣，自豪地展示他胸脯上刺着个哈佛深红色大H的刺青。这到底是个什么样的哈佛能让你们美国人这么虔诚？
小树分割线 小树分割线 小树分割线 小树分割线
In 1905, Harvard College adopted the College Entrance Examination Board tests as the principal basis for admission, which meant that virtually any academically gifted high-school senior who could afford a private college had a straightforward shot at attending. By 1908, the freshman class was seven per cent Jewish, nine per cent Catholic, and forty-five per cent from public schools, an astonishing transformation for a school that historically had been the preserve of the New England boarding-school complex known in the admissions world as St. Grottlesex.
1905年， 哈佛学院（哈佛的大学生院）采用了大学入学考试委员会规定的考试作为录取的主要依据。这就意味着那些学业有天赋的，能够付得起私立大学的高中生基本上都有一个直接了当的入学机会。到了1908年， 哈佛的新生中有7%的犹太人、9%天主教、45%公立学校毕业生。这对哈佛是一个惊天动地的巨大转变。 历史上，哈佛是为那些新英格兰的私立寄宿学校，在大学录取圈里称之为St. Grottlesex的毕业生们保留的。
As the sociologist Jerome Karabel writes in “The Chosen” (Houghton Mifflin; $28), his remarkable history of the admissions process at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, that meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically.By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising. A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the nineteen-twenties, stated flatly that too many Jews would destroy the school: “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate . . . because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.”
正如社会学家杰罗姆 卡拉贝尔 （Jerome Karabel）在他的那本关于哈佛，耶鲁和普林斯顿新生录取过程的历史演变的书《选择》（Chosen）中写到，择优录取的方法很快遇到了危机。 到了1922年， 哈佛注册的犹太人新生达到了22%、1/5是犹太人。学校的管理阶层和校友开始强烈抗议。犹太人被认为是令人厌恶的、贪婪的、斤斤计较学分的、孤傲的。 他们占据了原来属于富有的， 英伦白人清教徒（WASP， White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant）的孩子们的位置。 这样会不利于学校捐款。劳伦斯 罗威尔，当时的哈佛校长公开声称，太多的犹太人会毁灭哈佛：那些让犹太人入住的被毁坏的夏季旅馆是活该。。。因为他们先赶走了那些非犹太人的人，当那些非犹太人离开后， 犹太人也离开了。
The difficult part, however, was coming up with a way of keeping Jews out, because as a group they were academically superior to everyone else. Lowell’s first idea—a quota limiting Jews to fifteen per cent of the student body—was roundly criticized. Lowell tried restricting the number of scholarships given to Jewish students, and made an effort to bring in students from public schools in the West, where there were fewer Jews. Neither strategy worked. Finally, Lowell—and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton—realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit. Karabel argues that it was at this moment that the history and nature of the Ivy League took a significant turn.
困难的是，如何想出一个办法把犹太人拒于校门之外，因为作为一个族群，他们的学业优于任何一个其他族群。校长罗威尔的第一个想法是设定限额，限制犹太人学生在15%，这个想法遭到普遍反对。罗威尔又设法限制发奖学金给犹太学生，从西部的公立学校录取更多的学生，因为西部的犹太人比较少。这些办法都不见效。最后，罗威尔和他的耶鲁、普林斯顿的同僚意识到，如果“优秀”的定义是根据学业成绩而导致了学校不想要的那类学生，那么解决的办法就是改变“优秀“的定义。卡拉贝尔指出，就是从那个时候，常春藤大学的性质和历史发生了重大的改变。
The admissions office at Harvard became much more interested in the details of an applicant’s personal life. Lowell told his admissions officers to elicit information about the “character” of candidates from “persons who know the applicants well,” and so the letter of reference became mandatory. Harvard started asking applicants to provide a photograph. Candidates had to write personal essays, demonstrating their aptitude for leadership, and list their extracurricular activities. “Starting in the fall of 1922,” Karabel writes, “applicants were required to answer questions on ‘Race and Color,’ ‘Religious Preference,’ ‘Maiden Name of Mother,’ ‘Birthplace of Father,’ and ‘What change, if any, has been made since birth in your own name or that of your father? (Explain fully).’ “
从那时起，哈佛的录取办公室对于申请学生的个人生活细节更加关注。罗威尔告诉他的录取官哈佛需要从那些很了解申请学生的人那里了解申请人品性，于是推荐信成为必须的申请材料。 哈佛开始要求学生提供个人像片。申请者必须写申请短文，展示他们的领导能力和课外活动。从1922年秋季开始，卡拉贝尔写道，申请者必须回答种族、肤色、宗教信仰、母亲原姓、父亲出生地、父亲或自己是否改过姓名及其原因等问题。
At Princeton, emissaries were sent to the major boarding schools, with instructions to rate potential candidates on a scale of 1 to 4, where 1 was “very desirable and apparently exceptional material from every point of view” and 4 was “undesirable from the point of view of character, and, therefore, to be excluded no matter what the results of the entrance examinations might be.” The personal interview became a key component of admissions in order, Karabel writes, “to ensure that ‘undesirables’ were identified and to assess important but subtle indicators of background and breeding such as speech, dress, deportment and physical appearance.” By 1933, the end of Lowell’s term, the percentage of Jews at Harvard was back down to fifteen per cent.
普林斯顿对于派到各个主要私立寄宿学校的录取官指出，让他们给申请者打分（1到4分）。
1分是各方面都非常杰出的，学校非常希望录取的材料。
4分是从人品上说不能要的学生，无论他的入学考试成绩如何都不能录取的学生。面谈也成为新生录取的一个重要因素。就如卡拉贝尔写的，为了确保能识别那些”不想要的学生”，评估那些重要但是不太明显的反映学生家庭背景和家族出身细节，比如谈吐、 衣着、仪态和外表。到了1933年罗威尔任期结束时， 哈佛的犹太人学生又回到了15%。
If this new admissions system seems familiar, that’s because it is essentially the same system that the Ivy League uses to this day. According to Karabel, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton didn’t abandon the elevation of character once the Jewish crisis passed. They institutionalized it.
如果这个新的录取系统看上去有点似曾相识，那就是因为它跟现今的藤校录取系统基本上是一样的。根据卡拉贝尔，当犹太人的危机过去后哈佛耶鲁普林斯顿并没有放弃抬高对人品的要求，他们使其制度化了。
Starting in 1953, Arthur Howe, Jr., spent a decade as the chair of admissions at Yale, and Karabel describes what happened under his guidance:
小阿瑟 豪从1953起任耶鲁大学新生录取主任。卡拉贝尔描述了在小阿瑟指导下耶鲁录取的变化：
The admissions committee viewed evidence of “manliness” with particular enthusiasm. One boy gained admission despite an academic prediction of 70 because “there was apparently something manly and distinctive about him that had won over both his alumni and staff interviewers.” Another candidate, admitted despite his schoolwork being “mediocre in comparison with many others,” was accepted over an applicant with a much better record and higher exam scores because, as Howe put it, “we just thought he was more of a guy.” So preoccupied was Yale with the appearance of its students that the form used by alumni interviewers actually had a physical characteristics checklist through 1965. Each year, Yale carefully measured the height of entering freshmen, noting with pride the proportion of the class at six feet or more.
耶鲁的录取委员会特别对那些“阳刚的”男性学生感兴趣。一个男生尽管学术预期只有70分，但是由于他的阳刚男人特性赢得了校友跟录取官的认同而被录取。另外一名男生，尽管他跟他的其他中学同学相比，成绩中等， 他还是胜过比他学习成绩和考试成绩高很多的另一位申请者被录取。按照豪的说法，“我们认为他更像一个男子汉”。耶鲁是如此专注于学生的外貌，以至于直到1965年耶鲁的新生面谈的校友都有一张外貌检查表。每年耶鲁仔细检测入学新生的身高，自豪地注明每年超过六尺身高的男生比例。
[ 本帖最后由 pp_dream 于 2017-3-24 01:16 编辑 ]
