《财富》杂志最新的美国大学排行榜为学生量身定制
In the very long history of American higher education, the idea of ranking colleges is actually a fairly recent development.
在美国高等教育悠久的历史中，大学排名事实上是一个的很新的概念。
Though it seems like they have been around forever, the U.S. News & World Report rankings were first published in 1983, and at that time only every other year. In 1989, the magazine made them an annual ritual, but just ranked the top 25 national universities. In the beginning, the magazine based its rankings solely on a survey sent to college presidents and admissions directors asking them to rank their peers on their reputation.
虽然看起来似乎久负盛名，《美国新闻与世界报道》上的排名直到1983年才首次发表，并且当时每年只有一次。1989年该杂志进行排名的时候，只纳入了前25个国家的大学。 起初，排名仅仅基于杂志发送给大学校长和招生主管的调查，该调查要求他们对他们的声誉进行排名。
During the next three decades, U.S. News greatly expanded how it calculated the rankings, which gave higher marks to colleges that essentially spent more money on faculty and students. That formulation cost public universities dearly (in 1989, five of the top 25 universities were public; today just three are).
在接下来的三十年里，《美国新闻》极大地扩展了计算排名的方式，在教师和学生身上投入更多经费的学校将得到更高的分数。这种计算方式使得公立学校耗资高昂（在1989年，排名前25的大学里有5个是公立大学，而如今只有3个了）。
Competitors to U.S News seemed to come and go every year as new college rankings proliferated, but none of them could answer a basic question for students and parents: Of the thousands of colleges in the U.S., which ones are worth the return on my investment?
《美国新闻》的竞争对手似乎每年都来了又去，而大学排行榜的数量则在激增。但是没有一个能够回答学生和家长们的最基本问题：究竟哪些大学是值得投资的呢？
On Monday, Money Magazine entered the fray of rankings, releasing the second edition of what it calls “true value-based” ratings.
星期一，《财富》杂志加入了排名的战场，发布了第二版所谓的“真正基于价值”的排名。
[See Money’s top 25 rankings for 2015-2016, below.]
[点此查看《财富》杂志2015-2016美国大学排名Top25]
Given the relative youth of Money’s list, it doesn’t get nearly as much attention as the one from U.S. News, but it should. Money tries to crack the code on answering the ROI question, and of all the rankings out there, comes the closest.
鉴于《财富》杂志相对年轻，它没有获得《美国新闻》那样的关注度，但它应该得到。《财富》试图解决关于投资回报率的问题，而现有的所有排名在此问题上都是最为接近的。
[You finally selected a college, don’t start worrying about your major]
[你终于选择了一个大学，别马上就开始担心你的专业]
Unlike U.S. News, which focuses on several measures that really shouldn’t matter to students — percentage of alumni who donate, for example — Money magazine tries to answer the questions that prospective students should be asking on their college tours this summer: What is the graduation rate, net price (what’s the real tuition they’ll pay), how much do they and their parents have to borrow in loans, and will they learn any marketable skills that will help them get a job in order to pay back those loans?
不像《美国新闻》那样，专注于几项实际上与学生无关的措施——例如捐赠校友的比例——《财富》杂志试图回答那些准大学生们今年夏天就应该问的大学之旅的问题：什么是毕业率，净价格（他们要支付的真正的学费是多少），他们和父母需要贷多少的款，以及，他们会学到能够帮助他们得到能够还清贷款的工作的、市场需要的技能吗？
The final rankings from Money include some of the usual suspects: Stanford, MIT, and Princeton are in the top five. But schools that most people don’t think about when someone asks about the “best colleges” also cracked the top 25: Bentley University, Babson College, the University of California at Irvine, and BYU.
《财富》的最终排名包括了一些常胜将军：斯坦福，麻省理工，和普林斯顿大学都在前五名。但一些当有人问起“最好的大学”时我们不会想起的名字也跻身前25：宾利大学，巴布森学院，加州大学欧文分校，和杨百翰大学。
Schools on the list might look unfamiliar exactly because of what Money did right in calculating the rankings.
名单上的学校或许眼生，但那正是因为《财富》正确地计算了排名。
First, the Money rankings use “net price,” which is what you pay each year after subtracting scholarships and grants that don’t need to be paid back. And because a one-year price doesn’t give you the whole story, Money multiplies the net price by the average number of years it takes a student to graduate. An expensive college is fine, but not if it takes you eight years instead of four years to complete your degree.
第一，《财富》的排名采用“净价”，即减去奖学金和助学金等无需回报的金额后你每年需要支付的。而由于一年的价格不够完整，《财富》将净价与学生毕业需要的平均年数相乘。昂贵的大学是好的，但如果它需要你用八年而非四年完成学位，那就不好了。
Judith Scott-Clayton, an assistant professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, has found that the average college graduate pays for four and half years of college, not just four. Money noted that the average time for students to get a degree from all of the schools on its list was 4.3 years.
哥伦比亚大学师范学院的一名助教，朱迪思·斯科特 - 克莱顿，发现大学毕业生平均支付四年半的费用，而非四年。《财富》指出，学生从所有名单上的学校获得学位的平均时间为4.3年。
Secondly, in considering the amount of debt students take on to go to college, Money also included what parents borrow in federal PLUS loans. The size of PLUS loans has increased drastically in the past decade. Unlike student loans, PLUS loans don’t have a borrowing limit and are remarkably easy to get. So parents often turn to them to fill the gap in financing an education (and are often encouraged by some colleges, which include them in financial aid packages).
第二，考虑到学生为上大学所承担的债额，《财富》也涵盖了父母像联邦贷款PLUS借的钱。在过去的十年间，PLUS贷款的规模急剧增加。不同于学生贷款，PLUS贷款没有借贷上限，并且非常容易获得。所以家长们往往借此填补教育筹资的空白（并且经常是在一些学校的鼓励下这样做的，这些学校将此纳入他们的财政援助计划）。
Thirdly, Money adds more context to a college’s graduation rate. How many students graduate in four years or five years differs greatly within a college. What prospective college students should really find out is what the graduation rate is for students like them, since rates differ based on factors like gender, race and ethnicity, and major. The Money rankings include a “value-added graduation rate,” which is the difference between a school’s “actual graduation rate and its expected rate, based on the economic and academic profile of the student body.”
第三，《财富》为大学毕业率的计算增加了更多的背景。有多少学生四年或是五年毕业，这在大学之间有较大的区别。准大学生们真正应该寻找的是和他们相似的学生的毕业率，因为利率会由于不同的因素而不同，比如性别，种族和民族，以及专业。《财富》的排行榜包含“增值毕业率”一项，这是一所学校的在其“学生的经济和学术形象的基础上”，“实际毕业率”和“预期收益率”之间的区别。
[Think your college search is almost over? Think again: For many, a transfer awaits.]
[认为你的大学搜索快结束了吗？再想想吧：也许对很多人来说，即将迎来一个转折。]
Finally, the Money rankings attempt to answer the question that most parents are asking these days when they write a check for tuition: Will my child get a good job after graduation?
最后，《财富》的排名尝试回答这些天大部分家长开学费支票时都会问到的问题：我的孩子毕业后能不能得到一份好工作？
When Money first published its rankings last year, it based this “outcomes” category almost entirely on data from Payscale. The popular Web site gathers data on salaries for various professions from information collected by users, and we all are known to have inflated our salaries from time to time.
当《财富》去年首次公布排名的时候，它的“结果”几乎是全部基于PayScale的数据得出的。这个著名的Web网站通过用户收集的信息提供各行各业的工资数据，而我们都知道人们时不时地会夸大工资数。
As a result, the findings on this measure were among the most questioned of the rankings. The Payscale data are still part of the rankings this year, but they are supplemented by new findings from a Brookings Institution analysis of the market value of the 25 most commonly cited skills listed by alumni of each college in their LinkedIn profiles.
其结果是，这种方法得出的结果成为了最受质疑的排名之一。 来自PayScale的数据仍是今年排名依据的一部分，但今年的排名补充了一项新发现作为支撑：来自布鲁金斯学会的，对各高校校友在LinkedIn上最常提及的25项技能的市场价值的分析。
[Higher ed as a commodity? Colleges have only themselves to blame.]
[高等教育成为了一种商品？这只能怪大学自己了。]
Money’s rankings come just three weeks after the Obama administration dropped controversial plans for the federal government’s own version of ratings based on the value of a degree. With all the college rankings now being published, there was no need for the federal government to enter the game, too. The best thing the federal government can do is encourage, even mandate, colleges and states to report better data, particularly on earnings and outcomes of graduates. In the long run, that will encourage entities, such as U.S. News and Money, to publish their own set of rankings based on better information.
为联邦政府建立自己的、基于学位价值的排名的计划颇受争议，奥巴马政府取消了这一计划，短短三个星期后，《财富》的排名发布。鉴于所有的大学排名都已发布，联邦政府实在没有必要再掺上一腿。联邦政府能做的最好的事情就是鼓励，甚至强制要求，高校和各州报告更好的数据，特别是在大学毕业生的收入和成果方面。从长远来看，这将鼓励实体，如《美国新闻》与《财富》，发布自己的一套基于更好的信息的排名。
The problem with searching for a college with hard data is that it’s a very emotional decision that most 18-year-olds make only once in their life. It’s also what economists call an “experience good,” meaning you don’t know what you’re buying until after you experience it. But by supplying prospective students and their parents with better information that they can use to balance with their emotional side, they can perhaps make better choices about which schools are best for them.
寻找达到硬性数据指标的大学的问题在于，它是一个非常感性的决定，大多数18岁的孩子一生中只有一次。这也是经济学家们所说的“体验好”，意思是你不知道你要买什么，直到你遇到它。但是，通过为准大学生和他们的家长提供更好的信息，他们感性的一面就可以得到平衡，这样或许可以帮助他们更好地选择最适合他们的学校。
Money’s Best Colleges
Click here for the full Money rankings
1. Stanford University
2. Babson College
3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
4. Princeton University
5. California Institute of Technology
6. Harvey Mudd College
7. Harvard University
8. Maine Maritime Academy
9. Amherst College
10. University of California-Berkeley
11. Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
12. University of Pennsylvania
13. University of California-Irvine
14. Rice University
15. Brigham Young University-Provo
16. Bentley University
17. University of Virginia
18. University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
19. Claremont McKenna College
20. Texas A&M University-College Station
21. Yale University
22. Dartmouth College
23. Duke University
24. Washington and Lee University
25. Vanderbilt University
《财富》杂志美国最好的大学排行榜
点击这里查看完整的排行榜
1.美国斯坦福大学
2.巴布森学院
3.麻省理工学院
4.普林斯顿大学
5.加州理工学院
6.哈维穆德学院
7.哈佛大学
8.缅因州海事学院
9.阿默斯特学院
10.加州大学伯克利分校
11. 库伯高等科学艺术联合大学
12.宾夕法尼亚大学
13.加州尔湾大学
14.赖斯大学
15.杨百翰大学
16.本特利大学
17.弗吉尼亚大学
18．歇根大学安娜堡大学
19.卡莱门·麦肯纳学院
20.德州农工大学
21.耶鲁大学
22.达特茅斯学院
23.杜克大学
24.华盛顿和李大学
25.范德堡大学