读书真能改变命运？

Fewer rural students at colleges
高校农村学生越来越少了

The proportion of students from China's rural areas attending key universities has been falling significantly since the 1990s.
自20世纪90年代以来，我国高校农村学生的比例大幅下降。

The high cost of a university education plus the difficulty of finding a job after graduation has contributed to the prevailing idea in the countryside that "education is useless," the People's Daily reported.
人民日报报道称，大学高昂的学费，再加上毕业后的就业压力，让来自农村的很多人觉得“读书无用”。

Many rural families are ending their children's education earlier and sending them out to work to alleviate their economic burden.
许多农村家庭的孩子都会提早辍学，然后外出打工，帮家里减轻负担。

Entrance to elite universities is also becoming more difficult for students from the countryside because of fewer education resources or opportunities to travel.
由于教育条件的限制，以及没有机会开阔眼界，对于农村的孩子们来说，好大学的门槛太高了。

Top universities favor students with a wider knowledge of the world and have developed other skills in addition to their high test scores alone, the newspaper said.
该报还指出，除却高分外，顶尖的大学更青睐那些有着开阔的眼界且有一定特长的学生。

Peking University has about 10 percent of its students from rural areas at present, down from the 30 percent between the 1970s and early 1990s. Similar figures were reported at other universities, including Tsinghua University, also in Beijing, and Fudan University in Shanghai.
现在，北京大学共有10%的学生来自农村，但是在上个世纪70年代至90年代间，农村学生所占的比例是30%。其他的包括清华、复旦在内的高校也出现了同样的情况。

Huang Keke, a student at Peking University, was the first person from her hometown—Xiliu Village in Shaanxi Province—to go to such a top university. She had to apply for postgraduate study to give her an edge in the job market because she couldn't find a job.
来自陕西省西流乡的清华大学学生黄XX是他们乡的第一个考上名牌大学的学生。但是她不得不申请读研，以此让自己往后就业时更有优势，因为她现在根本就找不到工作。

She said her father has become disillusioned with higher education and believed it would have been better for his children to have looked for work earlier.
她说，她的父亲已经对读大学不抱期望了，他觉得让孩子早日工作还更好些。

Her brother Huang Lei didn't sit the college entrance examination but started work on a construction site instead.
她的弟弟连高考都未参加，现在在一个建筑工地上打工。

The rural poor, the newspaper said, used to believe that "education changes fate" but feel that is no longer true as they see more and more graduates returning home after failing to find a job.
报道指出，以前，农村人都相信“读书能改变命运”，但是在看到越来越多的毕业生因找不到工作而回老家之后，他们对高等教育也不再抱期望了。

Many families reportedly have been made poorer because of the cost of higher education. Sending a son or daughter to university could cost the equivalent of a family's income for 10 years in Gansu Province's Huining County. Half the families who had been lifted out of poverty had returned to that state again because of their investment in higher education.
据报道，很多家庭因为高昂的大学学费而变得越来越穷。在甘肃会宁，共一个孩子上大学就能用掉他们十年的收入。近半数的已基本脱贫，搬出那个地区的人因为供孩子上大学又重新回到了那个地方。