FOR America's colleges, January is a month of reckoning. Most applications for the next academic year beginning in the autumn have to be made by the end of December, so a university's popularity is put to an objective standard :how many people want to attend. One of the more unlikely offices to have been flooded with mail is that of the City University of New York (CUNY), a public college that lacks, among other things, a famous sports team, bucolic campus and raucous parties (it doesn't even have dorms), and, until recently, academic credibility.
于美国大学而言,一月是清算月。大多数要为下一学年学习的申请者须在入秋之始的12lrcp月底前完成。鉴于此，一所大学的声望便有了其客观依据演讲的技巧:如申请人的数量。纽约城市大学是一所公立院校,与其他学校相比,它没有声名显赫的运动队,也没有如田园诗般的校园,更没有喧嚣嘈杂的派对，甚至连宿舍都没有。直到最近仍未没取得学术上可信度,然而就是这所大学的办公室却塞满了学生们寄来的申请函,这似乎有些令人难以置信。
A primary draw at CUNY is a programme for particularly clever students, launched in 2001. Some 1,100 of the 60,000 students at CUNY's five top schools receive a rare thing in the costly world of American colleges :free education. Tho accepted by CUNY's honours
programme pay no tuition fees; instead they receive a stipend of $7,500 (to help with general expens) and a laptop computer. Applications for early admissions into next year's programme are up 70%.
自2001年，城市大学便为聪明过人的学生设立了培养计划。计划的主要内容便是免费教育，在6000名的城市大学生中，约有nexcom1100人可以得到免费教育，而这一消息对于花销巨大的美国大学而言，让人甚是差异。于那些被纳入荣誉计划的学生而言，不仅无需缴纳任何学费，他们还可以得到一笔7500美元的生活津贴（用于日常生活花费），同时他们还可得到一台笔记本电脑。较早的申请者中被批准进入下一学年计划的已达70%。
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Admission has nothing to do with being an athlete, or a child of an alumnus, or having an influential sponsor, or being a member of a particularly aggrieved ethnic group—criteria that are increasingly important at America's elite colleges. Most of the students who apply to the honours programme come from relatively poor families, many of them immigrant ones. All that CUNY demands is that the students be diligent and clever.
奖学金的批准与学生是否是运动员，亦或是校友的孩子，或者是有影响力的支撑者，或者
一建考试科目还是某个爱打抱不平的民族社团成员都毫无关系，而这些在美国的精英学府中也显得日益重要。于那些申请荣誉奖学金的学生而言，他们大多是新移民或者是相对贫困的家庭。而纽约市立大学只要求他们聪明勤奋而别无他求。
Last year, the average standardid test score of this group was in the top 7% in the country. Among the rest of CUNY's students averages are lower, but they are now just breaking into the top third (compared with the bottom third in 1997). CUNY does not appear alongside Harvard and Stanford on lists of America's top colleges, but its recent transformation offers a neat parable of meritocracy revisited.
去年，城市大学在标准测试的平均分为全美国最高的前高考下午几点结束7%。虽其他学生的平均分相对较低，但他们已进入全美前三（1997年为倒数三名）。城市大学现在还无法与哈佛和斯坦福这样的美国名校相提并论，然而其近来的转变，让我领略到了何为精英教育制度。
Until the 1960s, a good ca could be made that the best deal in American tertiary education was to be found not in Cambridge or Palo Alto, but in Harlem, at a small public school called City College, the core of CUNY. America's first free municipal university, fou
nded in 1847, offered its rvices to everyone bright enough to meet its gruelling standards.
在20世纪60年代以前，美国最好的高等教育院校并不是在剑桥亦或是帕洛阿尔托，而是在哈莱姆的一个城市大学，也就是纽约城市大学的中心。美国第一所市立免费大学创办于1847年，它为那些能够以足够聪明并且能应付他们严苛的入学标准之人提供服务。
City's golden era came in the last century, when America's best known colleges restricted the number of Jewish students they would admit at exactly the time when New York was teeming with the bright children of poor Jewish immigrants. In 1933-54 City produced nine future Nobel laureates, including the 2005 winner for economics, Robert Aumann (who graduated in 1950); Hunter, its affiliated former women's college, produced two, and a sister branch in Brooklyn produced one. City educated Felix Frankfurter, a pivotal figure on the Supreme Court (class of 1902), Ira Gershwin (1918), Jonas Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine (1934) and Robert Kahn, an architect of the internet (1960). A left-wing place in the 1930s and 1940s, City spawned many of the neo-conrvative int
ellectuals who would later swing to the right, such as Irving Kristol (class of 1940, extra-curricular activity :anti-war club), Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer.
城市大学的黄金时代始于上世纪，那时美国最知名的大学都限制犹太人学生入学，那时，处处都是贫苦且聪明的犹太移民的孩子。于1933年到1954年之间，城市大学培养出了9位后来获得诺贝尔奖的人，包括2005年经济学奖获得者罗伯特·奥曼（毕业于1950年）。而城市大学前附属女子学院则培养出两名诺贝尔奖获得者，同时它的布鲁克林的一所分校也培养出了一名。除此之外，它还培养出了最高法院的关键人物费利克斯•法兰克福（1902届）、埃拉•格什温（新东方英语报名1918届）、天花疫苗发明者乔纳斯•wiper索尔克（1934届）以及互联网设计者罗伯特•卡恩（1960届）等人。20世纪三、四十年代，城市大学作为左翼分子活动阵地，城市大学孕育了许多新保守主义知识分子，而他们后来都转向了右翼，比如欧文•the help克里斯托（1940毫秒英文届，活动积极分子并且参加过反战俱乐部）、丹尼尔•贝尔以及内森•格雷泽。
