PART I Reading Comprehension
Directions: Answer the following questions according to your understanding of the passages in about 150 words for each question. (72 points)
Passage 1
A college education provides lots of benefits. Those benefits include acquiring skills, identifying interests, learning about others across time and space, and establishing personal and professional connections. Abundant evidence exists that college graduates are more mature and self-confident, better citizens, healthier, wealthier and happier than individuals who do not have an undergraduate degree. As the cost of attendance has skyrocketed, however, students and their parents are focusing more and more on short-term considerations. Does college constitute a sound financial investment? Will a graduate get a good job with a high salary?
In Will College Pay Off? Peter Cappelli, a professor of management and director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, draws on existing data on employment and higher education in the United States to provide some surprising and provocative answers to these questions. In the process, he busts pervasive myths and misconceptions. Cappelli acknowledges that the average college graduate now earns considerably more than a person with a high school degree and that the gap between them is growing. He points out, however, that the “college wage premium,” the difference between the annual and lifetime earnings of college graduates and those who do not have an undergraduate degree, has been volatile in the United States over time. As recently as the 1960s and the 1970s, no gap existed. The current gap is higher for workers who have been out of college longer. Cappelli implies that it may well narrow sometime soon. In Italy and China, for example, college grads are no more successful than high school grads in the job market.
According to Cappelli, the current labor force is overeducated—a controversial claim at variance with recommendations by the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and other organizations dominated by corporate executives, who, Cappelli implies, have an interest in generating a surplus of qualified workers. The average worker, he indicates, has about 30% more education than his or her job requires. About 60% of parking lot attendants have some college education. To document this conclusion, Cappelli includes the results of a survey on employment outcomes 2010-2012 conducted by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Cappelli insists as well that the assumptions about the (decidedly positive) average financial impact of a college education have limited utility. One reason is that graduation rates have declined significantly, with fewer than 60% of students, many of them laden with loans, getting a degree six years after they entered as freshman. There are also dramatic differences between the “sticker price” and the tuition and fees families actually pay. Also, the variation across schools and fields for those who do graduate is quite large. Additionally, there is an excessive emphasis these days on first jobs, even though they are no longer a reliable indicator of a successful career path.
Equally important, Cappelli maintains that choosing a major in a field that is “hot”, an approach many politicians want to tie to financial support, is a “fool’s errand”. For one thing, labor markets are notoriously volatile. In response to the fracking boom, for example, enrollments in petroleum engineering have tripled; this huge surge, he predicts, will soon make the field as unattractive as it was in the 1980s. And, contrary to conventional wisdom, there does not appear to be a shortage of “STEM” (science, technology, engineering, math) grads. While the number of STEM grads is increasing dramatically, only 22% of recent undergraduates who completed majors in science and math got jobs using these skills. Cappelli also asserts that the increasingly pervasive tendency to push students into specialized, occupation-specific courses or majors—in animation, invasive cardiovascular technology, bakery science, turf and turf grass management, fire protection engineering—“may well be exactly the wrong advice”.
Employers prefer to hire people who have decision-making, organizational and planning, problem solving, writing and communication skills. These skills, Cappelli suggests, are best learned in liberal arts programs. Currently derided by proponents of a more “practical” curriculum, “the liberal arts,” he writes, “may make the greatest intellectual and learning demands on students of any field.” To be sure, a liberal arts degree does not come with a guarantee of a big financial payoff. But then again, despite implicit and explicit promises, neither do the much ballyhooed applied vocational degrees.
Sending a child to college is often the most significant decision a family makes. A college degree can, and often does, pay substantial dividends (some of them financial) on that investment. But the relationship between the choice of a specific institution and a major and a lucrative and fulfilling first job and career is complicated. It has lots of moving parts. And so the best advice to prospective students may well be advice that has been around for a long time: after factoring in need-based financial and/or merit-based scholarships, go to the college with the best students and the most distinguished faculty. Major in what interests you most and what you are best at.
Question 1: What are Peter Cappelli’s findings in “Will College Pay Off ?”? Answer this question in about 150 words. (24 points)
Passage 2
What a beautiful city. Lights blinking serenely, highways and rivers flowing bridges on guard like giant eagles. And playgrounds, playgrounds everywhere. New York City is already on the map—specifically, the huge permanent Panorama that takes up an entire gallery at the Queens Museum, displaying all 895,000 buildings in the five boroughs. The organizers of the NYC2012 bid took the Olympic evaluation committee to the Panorama yesterday to demonstrate what this city would look like during a Summer Games—with just a nip here, a tuck there and, oh, by the way, a humongous stadium that would bring Western civilization and a bigger cash flow to the West Side of Manhattan. Yesterday these very able organizers trotted out fabled athletes like Billie Jean King, Grete Wait, Bill Bradley, Nadia Comaneci, Bart Connor, Bob Beamon, Janet Evans and Eamonn Coghlan, who all testified that New York would be a grand host in 2012 and an even better playground in the years afterward.
Even with vital needs for more schools, more hospitals, it is hard not to be tantalized by more sports facilities when King tells how her apprenticeship on the public courts of Long Beach, Calif, led directly to her glories at the United States Open in Forest His and Flushing Meadows. It is hard not to feel the international dynamics of the Olympics when Bradley relates how he used his minimal Russian to trash-talk a Soviet player at the 1964 Summer Games, before he became a member of the championship Knicks of melancholy and ancient memory. It is hard not to be pulled into the sporting energy of New York when Waitz recalls her first New York marathon, how she plodded through the quiet streets of Queers before crossing the Queensboro bridge. “I’m dying,” she said, recalling that wall of sound in Manhattan, which made her think, “Are they talking to me?” They were indeed talking to her, urging her to run faster. King and Bradley agreed that there was something in the New York air—maybe the legendary New York echo, the one that talks back—that makes people run faster, leap higher, think quicker.
Does any of this mean New York needs to be the host of the 2012 Summer Games? The organizers are putting on an impressive dog-and-pony show in New York. Central Park always looks good in snow, but this time it balances out the gaudy and temporary stunt of the bright-orange “Gates”. Not needing gimmicks. New York already has the heady confidence of a city deeply involved in its sports teams. The International Olympic Committee’s scouts are inspecting the city, but most New Yorkers care more about whether Jason Giambi and Mike Piazza get their power back.
The evaluation committee was taken out to Queens yesterday morning to visit the National Tennis Center. Despite the snowstorm Sunday night, the parking lots and walkways at the center were dry. “I had my five kids out there shoveling at 4 in the morning, paid them 1$ an hour,” said Jay Kriegel, the executive director of NYC2012, who was, perhaps, joking. The NYC2012 people even organized a sortie to Madison Square Garden, the proposed site of Olympic basketball in 2012. The Garden is run by the Dolan Cablevision people, who are fighting the three-in-one stadium plan, but the visit was gracious on all sides. Bradley, the former three-term senator from New Jersey, was at the Garden, where he used to push Jack Marin of the Baltimore Bullets and get free for backdoor layups. This time he shot baskets with the evaluation commission. There is apparently no I.O.C. law against that.
The organizers are planning to build pools and whitewater canoe courses and equestrian centers that would theoretically benefit New Yorkers for generations. They make a very good presentation about the lasting value of the Games to any host city. “The I.O.C. does not want white elephants,” King said. To guarantee a lasting impact, the NYC2012 people have organized a Legacy Foundation, which started with a $75 million endowment. Andrew Kimball, the director of operations for NYC2012, addressed the evaluation committee and said legacy “is a critical issue for them.”
The drawback is that this entire bid is hinged upon NYC2012’s insistence on building a multipurpose center with a retractable dome that would serve as convention center, indoor arena and Jets football stadium. “In fact, we are creating an entirely new neighborhood in New York City,” Kriegel said while overlooking the low-slung railroad yards and warehouses alongside the Hudson River.
The organizers may have painted themselves into a corner by ignoring the prospect of an Olympic stadium on cheaper, more accessible open space in Queens. New York can always use better sports facilities. But this is one city that does not need the Summer Games to put itself on the map.
Question 2: According to the passage, what were the efforts that the organizers of NYC 2012 bid made to bid for the Summer Olympic Games? Answer this question in about 150 words. (24 points)
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