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ASK just about any high school senior or junior — or their parents — and they'll tell you that getting into a selective college is harder than it used to be. They're right about that. But the reasons for the newfound difficulty are not well understood. 如果你去问任何高中高年级生或低年级生，抑或他们的家长，他们会告诉你，进入一所知名的大学比以前更难了。他们这么说是对的。不过，人们并不充分了解带来这种新难题的原因。 Population growth plays a role, but the number of teenagers is not too much higher than it was 30 years ago, when the youngest baby boomers were still applying to college. And while many more Americans attend college than in the past, most of the growth has occurred at colleges with relatively few resources and high dropout rates, which bear little resemblance to the elites. 人口增长是一个原因，不过青少年的人口比30年前高不了多少，那个时候，最年轻的婴儿潮一代仍在申读大学。和过去相比，现在有更多美国人进入大学，然而入学率的增长大多出现在那些资源相对较少，辍学率相对较高的的院校，这些院校和顶尖学府几无相似之处。 So what else is going on? One overlooked factor is that top colleges are admitting fewer American students than they did a generation ago. Colleges have globalized over that time, deliberately increasing the share of their student bodies that come from overseas and leaving fewer slots for applicants from the United States. | 
