名校並非通往成功的唯一門票

Message to all you crazed parents desperately hiring tutors and padding your kid’s thin resume: Chillax. Attending an elite college is no guarantee of leadership, life success or earnings potential. Your obsession with getting your kid into an Ivy or Ivy-lookalike is “warped” and—given a largely fixed system—likely hopeless, concludes New York Times columnist Frank Bruni.

所有拼命請家教、包裝自己孩子單薄簡歷的家長們請注意了：淡定。進名牌大學並不能保證你的子女將獲得領導力、成功人生或滾滾財源。您對把孩子送進常青藤之類名校的執迷純屬誤入歧途，而且對孩子前景的希望有可能要落空，這是《紐約時報》（New York Times）專欄作家弗蘭克o布魯尼的研究結論。

In his new book “Where You Go is Not Who You’ll be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania,” Bruni takes us on a tour of the alumni status of top American leaders, starting with Fortune 500 CEO’s. The CEO’s of the top 10 (as of mid-2014) hail as undergrads not from Harvard and Yale but from the University of Arkansas; the University of Texas; the University of California, Davis; the University of Nebraska; Auburn; Texas A&M, the General Motors Institute (now Kettering University); the University of Kansas; and the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Only GE’s Jeffrey Immelt collected a four-year Ivy degree—from Dartmouth.

在其新著《好學校並非成才捷徑：給名校熱降溫》一書中，布魯尼向大家展示了美國頂尖領導人的學歷，開篇就是財富美國500強企業首席執行官的情況。前十大首席執行官並非哈佛或耶魯的畢業生，而是分別來自阿肯色大學、德克薩斯大學、加州大學戴維斯分校、內布拉斯加大學、奧本大學、德克薩斯A&M大學、通用汽車學院（現在的凱特琳大學）、堪薩斯大學及密蘇里大學聖路易斯分校。只有通用電氣的傑弗裏o伊梅爾特擁有常青藤名校的學歷——達特茅斯大學。

Bruni’s tour then moves to occupants of the White House, names usually associated with the Ivies, especially Yale. He reminds us that Obama first went to L.A.’s Occidental College before graduating from Columbia, and that Jimmy Carter attended Georgia Southwestern College and Georgia Tech on his way to the Naval Academy. Ronald Reagan attended tiny Eureka College in Illinois; Richard Nixon got his bachelor’s from California’s Whittier College; LBJ attended Southwest Texas State Teachers College. Those were different times, certainly.

布魯尼隨後又談到了白宮的歷任主人，他們的名字通常都跟常青藤盟校聯繫在一起，尤其是耶魯大學。不過，他提醒大家，奧巴馬在就讀哥倫比亞大學之前，上的是洛杉磯的西方學院，而吉米o卡特在入讀美國海軍學院前，分別就讀於喬治亞西南學院和喬治亞理工學院。羅納德o里根上的是伊利諾伊州尤里卡學院；理查德o尼克松是在加州惠特學院拿的學士學位；林登o貝恩斯o約翰遜上的是德州西南師範學院。當然，所有這些聽起來都很久遠。

But today fewer than a third of Senators have an Ivy-caliber undergrad degrees, and only a quarter of governors first attended elite colleges. Similar numbers apply to influence-makers ranging from political strategists to Bruni’sNew York Times colleagues. (Bruni, who has written two best-selling books before this, graduated from the University of North Carolina.)

但今天，美國也只有不到三分之一的參議員擁有常青藤本科學位，只有四分之一的州長本科就讀於名校。而類似的比例也同樣適用於那些左右輿論的大腕們，無論是政治家還是布魯尼在《紐約時報》的同事（布魯尼本人也畢業於北卡羅來納大學，他此前還出過兩本暢銷書）。

It’s true that many of the leaders who started at non-elite colleges as undergrads later attended prominent graduate schools in law, business, medicine and so on. But the point is that they found their own way there—as young men and women in their early 20s, not teenagers pressed into action by parents and peers.

的確，不少本科就讀於普通學院的領導者後來都考入著名的法學院、商學院、醫學院等深造。但關鍵在於，他們是在20歲出頭時自覺發奮走上這一條路的——而不是在十幾歲時，迫於父母和同學的壓力才這麼做。

Bruni reminds us of the absurdity of obsessing over a kid’s 14- to 17-year-old stage in life. “Those last years of high school are just one short stretch of a life with many passages before it and many to come,” he notes.

布魯尼提醒大家，過於關注孩子14歲到17歲這個年齡段實在荒唐。他說：“高中最後那幾年只是人生的一小段，之後的人生道路還長着呢。”

And in many ways big public schools can even be incubators for ambition because they favor self-starters. I’ve been awed by the incredible opportunities that automatically float to the Harvard undergrads I once taught–-from building homes for the poor in Nicaragua to landing prime White House internships. Yes, these kids are smart and motivated and deserving. But so is my high-school volunteer firefighter son with near perfect SAT scores—and he has to hunt and peck for similar opportunities at his big public university. (I had the same experience attending UC Berkeley.)

而且從很多方面看，大型公立學校可能更有助於培養遠大抱負，因爲這種品質更偏愛自立自強的人。我在哈佛任教時曾驚奇地發現，對那裏的學生而言，各種難以置信的機會唾手可得，比如爲尼加拉瓜的窮人建造房屋、到白宮去實習。這些學生確實天資聰穎、有上進心，應該得到這些機會。但儘管我正在上大型公立大學的兒子在尋找類似機會方面必須竭盡全力，但他做的毫不遜色，他高中時曾當過志願消防隊員、SAT成績接近滿分。

Bruni concludes that the “admissions hysteria” is likely a waste of time, and certain heartbreak, for most applicants to elite schools. If your child is not a legacy or top athlete (preferably in an obscure sport); if you as a parent are not a current or prospective donor, or a celebrity, or faculty—all adding up to about 55% of “special consideration admissions”—the odds of admission are slim indeed.

布魯尼認爲，對多數申請名校的人來說，“名校狂熱症”很可能只是浪費時間，最後只會讓人心碎。如果你的孩子不是天才或頂尖運動員（最好是某個冷門項目）；如果作爲父母，你現在或將來都沒有財力給學校捐一大筆錢，你既不是名人也不是本校教職人員——這些因素在“招生特別加分項”中共佔約55%，那麼，你的子女被錄取的機率微乎其微。

He blames the biblical power of the US News & World Report rankings for feeding the admissions mania. Those ratings, he asserts, rely on easily –manipulated criteria like acceptance rates (Stanford has set a new extreme in exclusiveness at 5.1%) and favor wealthy institutions with vestigial reputations. The US News ratings “don a somber gray suit of authority, but it’s a hustler’s threads,” he writes…”exploiting people’s insecurities.”

長期以來，《美國新聞與世界報道》的大學排行榜被人奉若神明，布魯尼責備它對名校熱起到了推波助瀾的作用。在他看來，這些排名主要是基於一些極容易受操控的評價標準，比如錄取率（斯坦福大學最新的錄取率僅有5.1%），更偏愛那些聲譽日衰的有錢院校。他在書中寫道：這個排行榜“披着莊重的灰色權威外衣，其實不過是騙子精心編織的外套，”它利用的是人們的不安全感。

Bruni also dives deep to offer some surprises on non-elite public schools. Arizona State University, typically dismissed as a party-school, actually ranks high with private sector recruiters looking for entry-level talent.

布魯尼還深入挖掘了一些非名校的公立大學的亮點。比如亞利桑那州立大學通常被人貶爲是一所“吃喝玩樂大學”，但實際上在招聘方口碑頗高，不少私營公司在招聘初級職員時都會優先考慮該校學生。

Last year’s Gallup-Purdue Index surveyed 30,000 graduates on their careers and concluded that success relies less on where you go to college than how you go to college.

去年，“蓋洛普-普渡指數”調研了三萬名畢業生的職業生涯後得出結論：成功更多地與你上大學的動力有關，而不光是你上了什麼大學。

That’s largely Bruni’s conclusion—and it’s one echoed in his book by accomplished leaders like Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, a 1975 graduate of Northern Michigan University (where he was the only Jewish kid in his dorm). Here’s what the Brooklyn-born Schultz offered as a recipe for success: “Be as curious as you can. Put yourself in situations where you’re not just yielding to what’s familiar. I came out of college with a level of confidence and self-understanding that I don’t think I could have possibly gotten from an East Coast school, where I would have been among the kind of people I grew up with and lived near.”

在布魯尼的結論與此異曲同工——在他的書中，這一點在星巴克首席執行官霍華德o舒爾茨身上獲得了充分印證。舒爾茨本人1975年畢業於北密歇根大學，那時他是寢室裏唯一的猶太人。作爲土生土長的紐約客，舒爾茨眼中的成功祕訣是：“努力保持好奇心。使自己不要止步於熟悉的環境。我大學畢業時，既有自信，也有自知之明，這些都是一所東海岸院校無法帶給我的收穫，如果那樣的話，我只能長成自己從小就熟識的那個圈子裏的人。”