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阅读理解
The US Department of Labour statistics (统计) show that there is an oversupply of college-trained workers and that
this oversupply is increasing. Already there have been more than enough teachers,
engineers, physicists, aerospace experts, and other specialists. Yet colleges and
graduate schools continue every year to turn out highly trained people to compete
for jobs that aren't there. The result is that graduates cannot enter the professions
for which they were trained and must take temporary jobs which do not require a
college degree.
On the other hand, there is a great need for skilled
workers of all sorts: carpenters, electricians, mechanics, plumbers, and TV repairmen.
These people have more work than they can deal
with, and their annual incomes are often higher than those of college graduates.
The old gap that white-collar workers make a better living than blue-collar workers
no longer holds true. The law of supply and demand now favours the skilled workmen.
The reason for this situation is the traditional
myth that college degree is a passport to a prosperous future. A large part of American
society matches success in life equally with a college degree. Parents begin indoctrinating(灌输) their children with this myth before they are out of grade school.
High school teachers play their part by acting as if high school education were
a preparation for college rather than for life. Under this pressure the kids fall
into line. Whether they want to go to college or not doesn't matter. Everybody should
go to college, so of course they must go. And every year college enrollments (入学) go up and up, and more and more graduates are overeducated for the
kinds of jobs available to them.
One result of this emphasis on a college education
is that many people go to college who do not belong
there. Of the sixty per cent of high school graduates who enter college, half
of them do not graduate with their class. Many of them drop out within the first
year. Some struggle on for two or three years and then give up.
