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问题详情：

If You Get In, Make College Count

As tuition costs rise, with post-undergraduate (本科毕业后) jobs difficult to find, is higher education worth the cost?

Here is an unfortunate truth: For far too many incoming freshmen, college－any college－is not worth it. Year after year, students fail to get the full value of their tuition.

Many critics blame this cost/value problem on the universities, though each critic might point to a different reason: teachers always think of difficult research, the high costs of athletics, or the popularity of majors that are supposedly not suited to the new job market, to name some of their favorites.

But these are symptoms and not the illness itself. In our experience, the source of the wasted university experience begins with the student. Too often, students make bad choices or, frankly, just not enough great choices.

Too often we meet students who are so exhausted by the business of getting into college that they don’t work hard once they arrive－one of the most common wastes of time and tuition. A poorly constructed transcript (成绩单) can be destructive to a student’s education. Failure to engage and build professional working relationships with professors in office hours (which may lead to continued study, internships and more) also hurts the student’s experience.

 Another mistake is failing to make use of the many support networks on today’s college campuses. It’s almost embarrassing how many good offerings are rolled into each tuition dollar, but most students don’t know they exist.

Another common point of failure is filling the schedule with too many extracurricular activities as students once did in high school, rather than getting intensely involved in one or two at most. The same can be said of overburdened course loads.

The final great failure we frequently see is the approach students (and their parents) take to selecting a major and accurately seeing its impact on a future career. University systems are not vocational schools. While critics nowadays complain about the attraction of useless majors – and some do exist – more frequently we see too many students pursue a course of study that is not their strength, simply because it seems to have obvious connections to a potential job after graduation.

Rather than perform poorly in a “practical” major and be of little interest as a future job candidate, we say it is better to major in a subject where a student would do well and master the tools of communication and analysis. Students who choose a unique major should complement (使更具有吸引力) that with some well-chosen skill courses, internships and other co-curricular activities that help them with career opportunities after college.

So, is college worth it? It can be. Studies show that college graduates have many advantages – material, social and emotional – that can lead to greater success later in life.

To get the full value out of college, students must be as diligent and creative about getting out of college as they were about getting in. After all, the most beautiful, Olympic saltwater pool does you no good if you don’t know how to swim.

【回答】

le / unlikely

e

ssion/ going

urces / support

icipating / joining

od / way

ngth(s)/advantage(s)/merit(s)

ease/ boost

gence

lusion

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