第一单元商务英语完整版.pdf

Article with Chinese Guide and Exercises for Lecture One (完整版) What’s the Purpose of College: A Job or an Education? By Jeffrey J. Selingo February 2, 2015 The Washington Post 1 As the price of college has skyrocketed and tens of thousands of recent graduates have found themselves on the unemployment line or stuck in jobs that don’t require a bachelor’s degree, higher education has come under attack for its failure to make students job-ready. Adding fuel to the debate is a series of what seem to be monthly surveys showing a wide gap between what employers want out of today’s college graduates and what schools are producing. 2 It all begs the question: Is it solely a college’s responsibility to make students job-ready? 3 College was once seen as a place where adolescents went to explore courses and majors before settling on a job and career, often well after graduating. In a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dan Berrett traced the history of when the purpose of college shifted from that idyllic1 vision to today’s view that it’s all about getting a job. He pegged2 the origins to Feb. 28, 1967. That’s when Ronald Reagan, then the new Republican governor of California (which boasted the best system of public universities in the country), told reporters that taxpayers shouldn’t be “subsidizing intellectual curiosity.” 4 Since then, in both their attitudes and in their choice of majors, college students have increasingly seen a bachelor’s degree as a means to an end: a job. Freshmen now list getting a better job as the most important reason to go to college in an annual UCLA survey of first-year students. Previously, the top reason was learning about things that interest them. 5 The number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in traditi