四级真题快速阅读.docxVIP

 PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 29  PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 29 2013.12（2） Is College a Worthy Investment? A) Why are we spending so much money on college? And why are we so unhappy about it? We all seem to agree that a college education is wonderful, and yet strangely we worry when we see families investing so much in this supposedly essential good. Maybe its time to ask a question that seems almost sacrilegious (大不敬的）：is all this investment in college education really worth it? B) The answer, I fear, is no. For an increasing number of kids’ the extra time and money spent pursuing a college diploma will leave them worse off than they were before they set foot on campus. C) For my entire adult life, a good education has been the most important thing for middle-class households. My parents spent more educating my sister and me than they spent on their house, and theyre not the only ones... and, of course, for an increasing number of families, most of the cost of their house is actually the cost of living in a good school district. Questioning the value of a college education seems a bit like questioning the value of happiness, or fun. D) The average price of all goods and services has risen about 50 percent. But the price of a college education has nearly doubled in that time. Is the education that today’s students are getting twice as good? Are new workers twice as smart? Have they become somehow massively more expensive to educate? E) Perhaps a bit. Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economics professor, says, ‘.I look at the data, and I see college costs rising faster than inflation up to the mid-1980s by 1 percent a year. Now I see them rising 3 to 4 percent a year over inflation. What has happened? The federal government has started dropping money out of airplanes. Aid has increased, subsidized （补贴的）loans have become available, and the universities have gotten the money. Economist Bryan Caplan, who is writing a book about education, agrees： It’s a giant waste of resourc