揽瓜阁俱乐部第二期 Day13 2020.06.27
【社会科学-教育】 Could a fifth of America’s colleges really face the chop? （806字 精读 必做篇）
Martyna Malecka, a criminology student at Stonehill College, can’t wait for classes to restart in August. Her campus in Easton, Massachusetts, “feels like a village”: its elegant red-brick buildings sprawl over 384 bucolic acres. She judges time spent there less of a coronavirus risk than staying at home in Chicago.
Universities everywhere have made valiant efforts to function remotely. A few, such as California State University, say they will continue teaching only online next year. Ms Malecka doubts that distance study works. She gets top marks, but laughingly admits she has “no idea” what she has learned after being at home since March. It is too easy to ignore lecturers who appear by video, she says, and some hardly set assignments. Like other students, families and faculty, she craves in-person learning.
Whether or not universities get back quickly to that, many are likely to suffer. Stonehill is private and Catholic, with 2,500 students and a $200m endowment. It looks in good shape, but many similar liberal-arts colleges, especially in the north-east and Midwest, are not. Their problems are long-standing. Nathan Grawe of Carleton College in Minnesota, who researches demography and higher education, says the core difficulty is the slipping fertility rate. Overall enrolment has drifted down over the past few years.
This squeezes smaller colleges hardest. A study by Parthenon-ey, an education consultancy, of over 2,000 colleges suggested 800 are so small or inefficient that they may go bust. Around one-fifth run budget deficits. Others pile up debts, fail to build sufficient endowments or sustain student numbers only by agreeing to painfully big discounts on fees. Mr Grawe points out that eight colleges were already closing each year before the pandemic.
Those that fail are usually small, among the 40% of higher-education institutions with fewer than 1,000 students. In the past decade these have seen enrolments slip faster than medium-sized ones. (The biggest typically still thrive.) Of the 72 colleges Parthenon found had shut since 2007, almost every one was small. They are vulnerable because they depend most on revenue from students; others find ways to hire out campuses for conferences, raise research funds, earn bequests and the like.
Robert Zemsky of the University of Pennsylvania, who co-wrote a recent book on the growing woes of universities, expects a “collapse, lots of closures” of smaller colleges, notably in the wider Midwest. He blames both demography and teaching methods that do not suit some students, noting how, at many universities, more than a quarter of freshmen quit in their first year. Curriculums, he says, are outdated, faculty are out of touch and four-year degrees should be cut to three to save costs and force a rethink of higher education.
Among the most vulnerable colleges are those that cater mostly to non-white students. “African-Americans are more than two times as likely to attend an institution at risk, compared with whites and Hispanics,” he says. Crystal Nix-Hines, a lawyer in Los Angeles who specialises in the education sector, also expects an “enormous winnowing” of historically black colleges.
Consolidation of higher education is overdue. Students increasingly prefer bigger and more urban institutions, so some smaller, rural ones will go. How many? Just before the pandemic, Mr Zemsky and his co-authors suggested that 10% of colleges would eventually close. He now expects 20% to shut or merge with others.
The pandemic further dims their prospects in several ways. Take universities’ efforts to recruit foreign students, who typically pay full fees. For each of the past three years, enrolments of foreign undergraduates have slid. A drop in Chinese students explains much of that. Travel bans and concern that America has bungled the coronavirus will only put off more.
The economic slump means some poorer families will not send youngsters to study. Others will delay. Funding from states for public universities is certain to fall. A report by Pew Charitable Trusts published on May 18th points out that states cut funds for higher education by 29% per student between 2008 and 2012. This time the slump is likely to be worse. Already Nevada and Ohio say they have plans to cut. The University of Michigan has talked of losing out on $1bn. Federal spending will rise ($14bn in emergency help went to universities and students under the Cares Act), but is unlikely to make up all the shortfall.
Finally, many universities face possibly costly legal trouble. Ms Nix-Hines counted 134 lawsuits, mostly class-action ones, levied against the “whole gamut” of private and public colleges by late May, mostly as students sought the return of tuition fees, saying they received a substandard service online. Some colleges might now seek a “liability shield” to protect against future prosecutions before they reopen. For universities, it all adds up to “their greatest challenge in history”, she says. That may sound alarmist, but it is probably true.
Source: The Economist
【社会科学-科技】 Donut Sugar Could Help Stored Blood Last （432字 2分56秒 精听 必做篇）
先做精听再核对原文哦~
Blood donations save lives. But blood can only be stored under refrigeration for up to six weeks. After that, it’s no longer usable for transfusions.
“Because of that limitation, people have to continually donate blood to meet the needs. But also, in places where refrigeration may not be available, that can also be a challenge. It’s difficult to have blood available when needed.”
University of Louisville bioengineer Jonathan Kopechek. He says disruptions to regular blood donations due to COVID-19 have put stress on the blood supply, and the pandemic underscores the need for more reliable long-term storage methods. Blood can be frozen for extended periods of time ...
“But it’s pretty rare because of all the challenges and complexities with that process.”
Instead Kopechek’s team has developed a method of preserving blood so it can be stored in a dehydrated state at room temperature. To do so, they turned to an unusual preservative: a sugar called trehalose, which is a common ingredient in donuts ...
“To help make them look fresh even when they might be months old, and you wouldn’t know the difference.”
The researchers chose trehalose because, in nature, it’s made by hardy animals like tardigrades and sea monkeys—aka brine shrimp—famous for their ability to survive dehydration.
“So these animals can dry out completely for a long period of time and then be rehydrated and resume normal function. So we wanted to use the trehalose that’s produced by these organisms and apply that to preserving blood cells in a dried state, just like those organisms are.”
But first, the researchers had to get trehalose into blood cells. They used ultrasound to drill temporary holes in the cell membranes—which let some trehalose get in.
“And they need to have sufficient levels of trehalose on both the inside and the outside of the cell in order to survive the dehydration and rehydration process.”
At that point, the blood could be dried and made into a powder.
“And then we can rehydrate the blood and have it return back to normal.”
The team is still trying to improve yields but thinks the dried blood could be stored at room temperature for years. The study is in the journal Biomicrofluidics.
Kopechek says the technique could be ready for clinical trials in three to five years. If successful, it could be used to create stores of dried blood in case of future pandemics or natural disasters—and for humanitarian aid work, military operations or even missions to Mars. Maybe first aid kits on the Red Planet will include dried red blood cells.
Source: Scientific American
【笔记格式要求】
精读笔记格式要求： 1.总结文章中心大意 2.总结分论点或每段段落大意 3.摘抄印象深刻或者觉得优美的句子 4.总结文章中的生词 5.记录阅读时间、总结时间、总时间
精听笔记格式要求： 1.逐句听写整篇文章 2.对照原文修改听写稿，标记出错原因 3.总结文章中心大意 4.总结精听过程中的生词 5.记录听写时间、总结时间、总时间
这里也给大家两点学习小建议哦~ 精读：如遇到读不懂的复杂句，建议找出句子主干，分析句子成分，也可以尝试翻译句子来帮助理解~ 精听：建议每句不要反复纠结听，如果听 5 遍都没听出来，那就跳过，等完成后再回听总结原因，时间宝贵，不要过于执着哦~
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发表于 2020-6-26 20:29:21
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