Who Gets to Graduate?

为什么穷人的孩子更难以完成大学学业

For as long as she could remember, Vanessa Brewer had her mind set on going to college. The image of herself as a college student appealed to her — independent, intelligent, a young woman full of potential — but it was more than that; it was a chance to rewrite the ending to a family story that went off track 18 years earlier, when Vanessa’s mother, then a high-achieving high-school senior in a small town in Arkansas, became pregnant with Vanessa.

从能够记事的时候起，凡妮莎·布鲁尔(Vanessa Brewer)就抱定了上大学的决心。独立、睿智、前途无量的女大学生形象对她极富吸引力。但上大学的意义不止于此;它还是一个改写18年前脱轨的家庭故事大结局的机会。那一年凡妮莎的妈妈在阿肯色州一个小镇读高三，成绩出色，可她怀上了凡妮莎。

Vanessa’s mom did better than most teenage mothers. She married her high-school boyfriend, and when Vanessa was 9, they moved to Mesquite, a working-class suburb of Dallas, where she worked for a mortgage company. Vanessa’s parents divorced when she was 12, and money was always tight, but they raised her and her younger brother to believe they could accomplish anything. Like her mother, Vanessa shone in school, and as she grew up, her parents and her grandparents would often tell her that she would be the one to reach the prize that had slipped away from her mother: a four-year college degree.

母亲的境遇比大多数少女妈妈好一些。她嫁给了高中时的男友，凡妮莎9岁那年，一家人搬到了达拉斯的工薪阶层郊区梅斯基特，她在那里的一家抵押贷款公司找到了一份工作。父母在凡妮莎12岁那年离异，家里总是缺钱花，但在凡妮莎和弟弟的成长过程中，父母不断鼓励他们，让他们相信自己能够依靠奋斗成就一番事业。像母亲一样，凡妮莎的学习成绩非常好。随着凡妮莎一天天长大，她的父母和祖父母时常对她说，她一定会取得她的妈妈当年错失的成就：一个四年制大学学位。

There were plenty of decent colleges in and around Dallas that Vanessa could have chosen, but she made up her mind back in middle school that she wanted to attend the University of Texas at Austin, the most prestigious public university in the state. By the time she was in high school, she had it all planned out: She would make her way through the nursing program at U.T., then get a master’s in anesthesiology, then move back to Dallas, get a good job at a hospital, then help out her parents and start her own family. In her head, she saw it like a checklist, and in March 2013, when she received her acceptance letter from U.T., it felt as if she were checking off the first item.

达拉斯市内和周围地区有很多不错的高校，凡妮莎完全可以从中选择一所。不过，早在上初中时，她就下定决心要上德州最负盛名的公立大学——德州大学奥斯汀分校(University of Texas at Austin)。上高中时，她已经做好了求学规划：首先，她将在德州大学完成高级护理课程，然后攻读一个麻醉学硕士学位，然后搬回达拉斯，在医院找一份好工作，帮助她的父母过上好日子，并组建她自己的家庭。在她的想象中，这项规划仿佛是一份梦想清单。2013年3月份，当她收到德州大学录取通知书的时候，那感觉就像是在第一个梦想上打了勾。

Five months later, Vanessa’s parents dropped her off at her dorm in Austin. She was nervous, a little intimidated by the size of the place, but she was also confident that she was finally where she was meant to be. People had warned her that U.T. was hard. “But I thought: Oh, I got this far,” Vanessa told me. “I’m smart. I’ll be fine.”

5个月后，凡妮莎的父母把她送到奥斯丁分校的宿舍。她有点紧张，诺大的校园让她多少有点胆怯，但她也充满了信心，因为她终于跨进这所让她魂牵梦绕的大学。不少人曾警告她，德州大学的日子很难熬。“但我想：哦，我已经走到这一步了，”凡妮莎告诉我。“我很聪明，没事的。”

And then, a month into the school year, Vanessa stumbled. She failed her first test in statistics, a prerequisite for admission to the nursing program. She was surprised at how bad it felt. Failure was not an experience she was used to. At Mesquite High, she never had to study for math tests; she aced them all without really trying. (Her senior-year G.P.A. was 3.50, placing her 39th out of 559 students in her graduating class. She got a 22 on the ACT, the equivalent of about a 1,030 on the SAT — not stellar, but above average.)

不过，新学年开始一个月后，凡妮莎就栽了个跟头。她没能通过第一次统计学测验，而这恰恰是入读护理课程的先决条件。她惊讶地发现，失败的感觉太糟糕了。这是一种她几乎从未经历过的体验。在麦斯奎特中学(Mesquite High)，她总是不费吹灰之力就能在数学考试中获得高分。(凡妮莎中学毕业那年的平均绩点[GPA]是3.50，在559名毕业班学生中位列第39名。她的ACT[美国大学入学考试]成绩为22分，相当于SAT[学业能力倾向测验]的1030分——不算特别优异，但高于平均水平。)

Vanessa called home, looking for reassurance. Her mother had always been so supportive, but now she sounded doubtful about whether Vanessa was really qualified to succeed at an elite school like the University of Texas. “Maybe you just weren’t meant to be there,” she said. “Maybe we should have sent you to a junior college first.”

凡妮莎给家里打了一个电话，想寻求一些安慰。妈妈一向非常支持凡妮莎，但这一次，她听上去似乎怀疑凡妮莎是否真的具备在德州大学这种名校获得成功的资质。“也许你原本就不适合上这所大学，”她说，“也许我们当初应该先送你去上个大专。”

“I died inside when she said that,” Vanessa told me. “I didn’t want to leave. But it felt like that was maybe the reality of the situation. You know, moms are usually right. I just started questioning everything: Am I supposed to be here? Am I good enough?”

“她说这话的时候，我心都死了，”凡妮莎告诉我，“我不想离开，但又觉得现实可能就是这样。毕竟，妈妈的判断通常都是正确的。我开始质疑一切：我应该到这里来吗?我是否足够优秀?”

There are thousands of students like Vanessa at the University of Texas, and millions like her throughout the country — high-achieving students from low-income families who want desperately to earn a four-year degree but who run into trouble along the way. Many are derailed before they ever set foot on a campus, tripped up by complicated financial-aid forms or held back by the powerful tug of family obligations. Some don’t know how to choose the right college, so they drift into a mediocre school that produces more dropouts than graduates. Many are overwhelmed by expenses or take on too many loans. And some do what Vanessa was on the verge of doing: They get to a good college and encounter what should be a minor obstacle, and they freak out. They don’t want to ask for help, or they don’t know how. Things spiral, and before they know it, they’re back at home, resentful, demoralized and in debt.

在德州大学，像凡妮莎这种来自低收入家庭、成绩优异、迫切想获得一个四年制学位，但在求学过程中陷入困境的学生还有数千人。在全美各大学，类似的学生更是多达数百万。许多人甚至还没有踏入大学校门就退缩了，要么是被各种复杂的助学金申请表格搞得头昏脑涨，要么是受到巨大家庭责任的拖累。一些学生不知道如何选择合适的高校，结果稀里糊涂地进了一所辍学的学生多于毕业生的平庸院校。许多学生被各种费用压得喘不过气来，或者背负了太多贷款。还有一些学生做了凡妮莎差点就要做的事情：进入一所好大学，碰到一个算不了什么的轻微障碍后，就被吓坏了。这些学生要么不想寻求帮助，要么不知道如何寻求帮助。随后，情况急转直下，在他们还没有反应过来之前，他们就已经回家了，充满忿恨，情绪低落，还背上了债务。

When you look at the national statistics on college graduation rates, there are two big trends that stand out right away. The first is that there are a whole lot of students who make it to college — who show up on campus and enroll in classes — but never get their degrees. More than 40 percent of American students who start at four-year colleges haven’t earned a degree after six years. If you include community-college students in the tabulation, the dropout rate is more than half, worse than any other country except Hungary.

有关大学毕业率的全美统计数据清楚地显现出两大趋势。其一是，大批学生步入大学校门，注册上课，但从未获得学位。在四年制大学，有超过40%的美国学生在6年后仍未获得学位。如果把社区大学学生包括在内，辍学率高达一半以上，比世界上除匈牙利之外的其他所有国家都要糟。

The second trend is that whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. To put it in blunt terms: Rich kids graduate; poor and working-class kids don’t. Or to put it more statistically: About a quarter of college freshmen born into the bottom half of the income distribution will manage to collect a bachelor’s degree by age 24, while almost 90 percent of freshmen born into families in the top income quartile will go on to finish their degree.

第二大趋势是，如今一个大学生能否顺利毕业，似乎完全取决于一个因素——他或她的父母赚多少钱。更直白的说法是：富家子弟能够毕业，而穷人和工薪阶层的孩子无法毕业。从统计数据来看，在家庭收入落在收入分布下半部分的大学新生中，大约有四分之一可以在24岁时获得学士学位。而在家庭收入位居收入分布最高四分之一的大学新生中，近90%将顺利完成学位课程。

When you read about those gaps, you might assume that they mostly have to do with ability. Rich kids do better on the SAT, so of course they do better in college. But ability turns out to be a relatively minor factor behind this divide. If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores. Take students like Vanessa, who do moderately well on standardized tests — scoring between 1,000 and 1,200 out of 1,600 on the SAT. If those students come from families in the top-income quartile, they have a 2 in 3 chance of graduating with a four-year degree. If they come from families in the bottom quartile, they have just a 1 in 6 chance of making it to graduation.

乍一看这些差距，你可能会认为它们主要跟能力有关：富家子弟的SAT成绩更出色，所以他们在大学的表现当然更好。但能力仅仅是这道鸿沟背后一个相对次要的因素。如果你比较一下那些标准化考试成绩相同，但家庭背景不同的大学生，你就会发现，他们的教育结果反映了其父母的收入，而不是他们自身的考试成绩。就以凡妮莎这种标准化考试成绩还算不错的学生(在满分为1600分的SAT考试中，获得1000到1200分)为例。如果这些学生来自收入分布最高四分之一的家庭，他们获得四年制大学学位的几率为三分之二。而如果他们来自收入分布最低四分之一的家庭，其顺利毕业的几率仅为六分之一。

The good news for Vanessa is that she had improved her odds by enrolling in a highly selective college. Many low-income students “undermatch,” meaning that they don’t attend — or even apply to — the most selective college that would accept them. It may seem counterintuitive, but the more selective the college you choose, the higher your likelihood of graduating. But even among the highly educated students of U.T., parental income and education play a huge role in determining who will graduate on time. An internal U.T. report published in 2012 showed that only 39 percent of first-generation students (meaning students whose parents weren’t college graduates) graduated in four years, compared with 60 percent whose parents both graduated from college. So Vanessa was caught in something of a paradox. According to her academic record, she had all the ability she needed to succeed at an elite college; according to the demographic statistics, she was at serious risk of failing.

对于凡妮莎来说，好消息是，她进入了一所非常难进的大学，由此提升了顺利毕业的几率。许多低收入家庭的学生“低就”，即他们不上，甚至不申请愿意录取他们的最难进的大学。一个似乎有点违反直觉的事实是，你选择的大学越难进，你顺利毕业的可能性反而越高。不过，即使在受过良好教育的德州大学学生当中，父母收入和教育程度也是决定一位学生能否顺利毕业的巨大因素。德州大学2012年发表的一份内部报告显示，只有39%的第一代大学生(即父母没上过大学的学生)在4年后顺利毕业，而父母都是大学毕业生的学生毕业率达到60%。所以说，凡妮莎似乎陷入了某种悖论。从她的学业成绩看，她拥有在一所名校获得成功所需的所有能力;而从人口结构统计数据看，她面临严重的失败风险。

But why? What was standing in her way? This year, for the first time, the University of Texas is trying in a serious way to answer that question. The school’s administrators are addressing head-on the problems faced by students like Vanessa. U.T.’s efforts are based on a novel and controversial premise: If you want to help low-income students succeed, it’s not enough to deal with their academic and financial obstacles. You also need to address their doubts and misconceptions and fears. To solve the problem of college completion, you first need to get inside the mind of a college student.

但为什么呢?究竟是什么障碍挡住她的求学道路?今年，德州大学首次尝试以一种认真的方式回答这个问题。该校管理者正在迎头解决凡妮莎这类学生面临的问题。这种努力基于一个新颖且有争议性的前提：如果你想帮助低收入学生获得成功，仅仅应对他们的学术和经济障碍是不够的。你还需要解决他们的疑虑、误解和恐惧。要想解决大学毕业率问题，你首先得进入一位大学生的内心世界。

The person at the University of Texas who has been given the responsibility for helping these students succeed is a 56-year-old chemistry professor named David Laude. He is, by all accounts, a very good college professor — he illustrates the Second Law of Thermodynamics with quotations from Trent Reznor and Leonard Cohen and occasionally calls students to the front of the class to ignite balloons filled with hydrogen into giant fireballs. But he was a lousy college student. As a freshman at the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tenn., Laude felt bewildered and out of place, the son of a working-class, Italian-American family from Modesto, Calif., trying to find his way at a college steeped in Southern tradition, where students joined secret societies and wore academic gowns to class. “It was a massive culture shock,” Laude told me. “I was completely at a loss on how to fit in socially. And I was tremendously bad at studying. Everything was just overwhelming.” He spent most of his freshman year on the brink of dropping out.

德州大学把帮助这些学生获得成功的重任，交给了56岁的化学教授戴维·劳德(David Laude)。劳德是一位人人称颂的优秀教授：他引用音乐人特伦特·雷泽诺(Trent Reznor)和伦纳德·科恩(Leonard Cohen)的歌词来讲解热力学第二定律，偶尔还会把学生叫到教室前点燃充满氢气的气球，形成巨大的火球。但当年上大学时，他可是一位差生。刚步入位于田纳西州塞沃尼市的南方大学(University of the South)时，劳德深感惶惑，与周围环境格格不入。作为加利福尼亚州莫德斯托市一个意大利裔工薪家庭的孩子，他无法适应这所沉浸于南方传统的大学——该校学生热衷于加入各种秘密社团，还喜欢身穿学院袍去上课。“那是一个巨大的文化冲击，”劳德告诉我，“我完全不知所措，不知道如何适应那里的社交生活。我也极其不擅长学习，似乎什么都应对不了。”大一那年，他差不多都是在辍学边缘度过的。

But he didn’t drop out. He figured out college, then he figured out chemistry, then he got really good at both, until he wound up, 20 years later, a tenured professor at U.T. teaching Chemistry 301, the same introductory course in which he got a C as a freshman in Sewanee. Perhaps because of his own precarious college experience, Laude paid special attention as a professor to how students were doing in his class. And year after year, he noticed something curious: The distribution of grades in his Chemistry 301 section didn’t follow the nice sweeping bell curve you might expect. Instead, they fell into what he calls a “bimodal distribution.” In each class of 500 students, there would be 400 or so who did quite well, clustered around the A and high-B range. They got it. Then there would be a second cluster of perhaps 100 students whose grades were way down at the bottom — D’s and F’s. They didn’t get it.

但他没有退学。他适应了大学生活，渐渐掌握了化学的要领，最终在这两方面都得心应手。20年后，他作为德州大学终身教授，执教当年他在塞沃尼读大一时得了C的入门课程《化学301》。或许是由于亲身经历过岌岌可危的大学生活，劳德特别关注班上学生的表现。年复一年，他注意到一个奇特的现象：《化学 301》课程的成绩分布并不遵循你可能预期的漂亮的钟形曲线;相反，它们呈现为他所称的“双峰分布”。在每个500名学生的班级中，往往有大约400名学生的成绩相当出色，聚集在A和高B区间。他们开窍了。另外大约100名学生形成第二个集群，他们的成绩很差——D和F。他们没有开窍。

To many professors, this pattern simply represents the natural winnowing process that takes place in higher education. That attitude is especially common in the sciences, where demanding introductory classes have traditionally been seen as a way to weed out weak students. But Laude felt differently. He acknowledged that some of his failing students just weren’t cut out for chemistry, but he suspected that many of them were — that they were smart but confused and a little scared, much as he had been.

在许多教授看来，这种规律只不过反映了高等教育的自然筛选过程。这种态度在理科领域特别常见——在这类学科，要求苛刻的入门课程传统上被视为一种淘汰差生的手段。但劳德不这样认为。他承认，有些成绩不及格的学生的确不具备学化学的资质，但他觉得许多所谓的差生其实很聪明，只不过感到困惑，有点害怕，就像当年的他那样。

To get a better sense of who these struggling students were, Laude started pulling records from the provost’s office. It wasn’t hard to discern a pattern. The students who were failing were mostly from low-income families. Many of them fit into certain ethnic, racial and geographic profiles: They were white kids from rural West Texas, say, or Latinos from the Rio Grande Valley or African-Americans from Dallas or Houston. And almost all of them had low SAT scores — low for U.T., at least — often below 1,000 on a 1,600-point scale.

为了更好地了解这些深陷困境的学生，劳德开始从教务办公室调阅他们的档案，很快就发现了一个规律：跟不上学业的学生多数来自低收入家庭。其中许多学生符合特定的民族、种族和地理特征：德州西部农村地区的白人，里奥格兰德河谷的拉丁裔，或者是达拉斯或休斯顿的非洲裔。几乎所有人的SAT成绩都不高，至少按德州大学的标准偏低，往往不到1000分(满分为1600)。

The default strategy at U.T. for dealing with failing students was to funnel them into remedial programs — precalculus instead of calculus; chemistry for English majors instead of chemistry for science majors. “This, to me, was just the worst thing you could possibly imagine doing,” Laude said. “It was saying, ‘Hey, you don’t even belong.’ And when you looked at the data to see what happened to the kids who were put into precalculus or into nonmajors chemistry, they never stayed in the college. And no wonder. They were outsiders from the beginning.”

德州大学对待跟不上学业的学生的默认策略是，让他们上辅导课——微积分预备课，而不是微积分;英语专业的化学课，而不是理科专业的化学课。“我觉得，再也想像不出比这种方式更糟糕的对策了，”劳德说。“这就像是在对学生说，‘嘿，你根本就不属于这里。’数据清楚表明，这些被安排学习微积分预备课或非专业化学课的学生，都没能在大学里留下来继续学业。这也难怪。他们从一开始就被挡在门外。”

In 1999, at the beginning of the fall semester, Laude combed through the records of every student in his freshman chemistry class and identified about 50 who possessed at least two of the “adversity indicators” common among students who failed the course in the past: low SATs, low family income, less-educated parents. He invited them all to apply to a new program, which he would later give the august-sounding name the Texas Interdisciplinary Plan, or TIP. Students in TIP were placed in their own, smaller section of Chemistry 301, taught by Laude. But rather than dumb down the curriculum for them, Laude insisted that they master exactly the same challenging material as the students in his larger section. In fact, he scheduled his two sections back to back. “I taught my 500-student chemistry class, and then I walked upstairs and I taught this 50-student chemistry class,” Laude explained. “Identical material, identical lectures, identical tests — but a 200-point difference in average SAT scores between the two sections.”

1999年的秋季学期开学伊始，劳德仔细梳理他执教的大一化学课的新生档案，找出大约50名学生，他们至少具有两项在过去没有通过这门课的学生中常见的“逆境指标”：低SAT成绩、低收入家庭、父母教育程度较低的家庭。他邀请所有这些学生申请参加一个新课程，后来还给它取了一个听上去像模像样的名称：德州跨学科计划(TIP)。TIP学生将组成一个《化学301》小班，由劳德执教。不过，劳德并没有降低课程难度，而是坚持要求他们掌握跟大班学生一样的具有挑战性的内容。事实上，他在日程表上安排自己连续教两个班。“我先给500个学生的大班上课，然后走到楼上，给这个50名学生的小班授课，”劳德解释说。“相同的内容，相同的讲课方式，相同的测验，但大、小班学生的平均SAT成绩存在200分的差距。”

Laude was hopeful that the small classes would make a difference, but he recognized that small classes alone wouldn’t overcome that 200-point SAT gap. “We weren’t naïve enough to think they were just going to show up and start getting A’s, unless we overwhelmed them with the kind of support that would make it possible for them to be successful,” he said. So he supplemented his lectures with a variety of strategies: He offered TIP students two hours each week of extra instruction; he assigned them advisers who kept in close contact with them and intervened if the students ran into trouble or fell behind; he found upperclassmen to work with the TIP students one on one, as peer mentors. And he did everything he could, both in his lectures and outside the classroom, to convey to the TIP students a new sense of identity: They weren’t subpar students who needed help; they were part of a community of high-achieving scholars.

劳德相信小班授课能够取得积极的效果，但他意识到，仅仅靠小班授课还无法填补SAT成绩的200分差距。“我们并没有天真地认为，他们只要来这个班上课，就会获得A分的好成绩——除非我们向他们提供大量支持，使他们有可能获得成功，”他说。因此，除了授课之外，劳德还采取了多项辅助策略：他为TIP 学生提供每周两小时的额外辅导;他给这些学生安排了指导老师，由其与他们保持密切联系，一旦他们遇到麻烦或成绩落后就及时干预;他还找来一些高年级学生充当TIP学生的同辈导师，为他们提供一对一指导。无论是在课堂上，还是在课外，劳德做了自己能做的一切，向TIP学生传递一种全新的身份认同：他们并非需要帮助的差生，而是一个高成就学者社区的一员。

Even Laude was surprised by how effectively TIP worked. “When I started giving them the tests, they got the same grades as the larger section,” he said. “And when the course was over, this group of students who were 200 points lower on the SAT had exactly the same grades as the students in the larger section.” The impact went beyond Chemistry 301. This cohort of students who, statistically, were on track to fail returned for their sophomore year at rates above average for the university as a whole, and three years later they had graduation rates that were also above the U.T. average.

TIP计划的效果之好，就连劳德也深感惊讶。“当我开始给他们测验的时候，他们取得了与大班相同的成绩，”他说。“这门课结束后，这群SAT成绩低 200分的学生得到了跟大班学生完全等同的分数。”这项计划的影响并不限于《化学301》。大二学年来临时，这群从统计数字看退学率较高的学生重返校园的比例高于全校平均水平;三年后，他们的毕业率也高于德州大学平均水平。

Two years ago, Laude was promoted to his current position — senior vice provost for enrollment and graduation management. His official mission now is to improve U.T.’s four-year graduation rate, which is currently languishing at around 52 percent, to 70 percent — closer to the rates at U.T.’s state-university peers in Ann Arbor, Chapel Hill and Charlottesville, Va. — and to achieve this leap by 2017. The best way to do that, Laude decided, was to take the principles and practices that he introduced 15 years earlier with TIP and bring them to the whole Austin campus.

两年前，劳德晋升至他目前的职位：招生及毕业管理事务高级副教务长。他现在的正式职责是，将德州大学的四年制本科毕业率从目前的52%提升至70% ——接近位于安阿伯、教堂山和弗吉尼亚州夏洛茨维尔等地的州立院校同行的水平，并且要争取最迟在2017年实现这一飞跃。要做到这一点，劳德判定，最好还是借鉴15年前TIP计划的原则和做法，将其推广到整个奥斯丁校园。

One complicating factor for administrators at the University of Texas — and, indeed, one reason the school makes for such an interesting case study — is that U.T. has a unique admissions policy, one that is the legacy of many years of legal and legislative battles over affirmative action. After U.T.’s use of race in admissions was ruled unconstitutional by the Fifth Circuit in 1996, the Texas Legislature came up with an alternative strategy to maintain a diverse campus: the Top 10 percent law, which stipulated that students who ranked in the top tenth of their graduating classes in any high school in Texas would be automatically admitted to the campus of their choice in the U.T. system. (As U.T. Austin has grown more popular over the last decade, the criterion for automatic admission has tightened; Texas high-school seniors now have to be in the top 7 percent of their class to earn admission. Automatic admits — Vanessa Brewer among them — make up about three-quarters of each freshman class.)

德州大学管理者不得不面对一个使情况复杂化的因素(其实，这也是该校成为一个如此有意思的案例研究对象的原因之一)，即该校拥有一套独特的招生政策，这是围绕平权行动展开的多年法律和立法角力的一项遗产。1996年，在第五巡回法庭裁定德州大学基于种族的招生政策违反宪法之后，德州议会推出另一项旨在维持多元化校园的策略：前10%法则，即在德州任何高中毕业班排名位于前10%的学生，将被他们在德州大学体系中选择的院校自动录取。(随着德州大学奥斯汀分校在过去十年越来越受欢迎，自动录取标准已经收紧;德州高三学生的成绩现在必须进入所在毕业班的前7%，才能够被自动录取。凡妮莎·布鲁尔就是其中一位自动录取生，这些学生现在占到每个新生班大约四分之三的比重。)

At high schools in the wealthier suburbs of Dallas, the top 7 percent of students look a lot like the students anywhere who go on to attend elite colleges. They are mostly well off and mostly white, and most of them rack up high SAT scores. What sets U.T. apart from other selective colleges is that the school also admits the top 7 percent of students from high schools in Brownsville and the Third Ward of Houston, who fit a very different demographic and have, on average, much lower SAT scores.

在达拉斯富裕郊区的高中，排名前7%的学生看上去跟任何地方随后进入名校的学生非常相似。他们大多出身富裕家庭，大多是白人，大多数人获得了很高的 SAT分数。德州大学与其他名校的不同之处在于，这所大学还录取布朗斯维尔和休斯敦第三区等地高中排名前7%的学生，这些学生来自非常不同的人口群体，其 SAT平均分也低得多。

The good news about these kids, from U.T.’s point of view, is that they are very good students regardless of their test scores. Even if their high schools weren’t as well funded or as academically demanding as schools in other parts of the state, they managed to figure out how to learn, how to study and how to overcome adversity. Laude’s experience teaching Chemistry 301 convinced him that they could succeed and even excel at the University of Texas. But when he looked at the campuswide data, it was clear that these were the students who weren’t succeeding.

从德州大学的视角看，好消息是这些孩子都是非常优秀的学生，尽管他们的考试成绩差强人意。即使他们就读的高中在办学资金和学业要求方面不如德州其他地区的高中，但他们依然领悟了如何学习、如何研究、如何克服逆境。执教《化学301》的经验使劳德确信，这些学生能够成功，甚至有望成为德州大学的优等生。但是摆在他面前的全校数据清楚地显示，这些学生往往跟不上学业。

“There are always going to be both affluent kids and kids who have need who come into this college,” Laude said. “And it will always be the case that the kids who have need are going to have been denied a lot of the academic preparation and opportunities for identity formation that the affluent kids have been given. The question is, can we do something for those students in their first year in college that can accelerate them and get them up to the place where they can be competitive with the affluent, advantaged students?”

“来这所大学求学的总有一些是富家子弟，另一些是需要帮助的孩子，”劳德说。“总会出现的情形是，需要帮助的孩子们得不到富裕孩子们被给予的大量学业准备，以及形成身份认同的机会。问题是，在这些学生进入大学的第一年，我们能不能做些什么事情来帮助他们加速提高，从而能够与那些得天独厚的富裕学生展开竞争?”

Before he could figure out how to help those disadvantaged students, though, Laude first had to find out exactly who they were. This was relatively simple to determine in a single chemistry class, but with more than 7,000 students arriving on campus each year, finding the most vulnerable would be a challenge. Laude turned to a newly formed data team in the provost’s office called Institutional Research. Like every big university, U.T. had long had an in-house group of researchers who compiled statistics and issued government-mandated reports, but with Institutional Research, the school had created a data unit for the Nate Silver era, young statisticians and programmers who focused on predictive analytics, sifting through decades’ worth of student data and looking for patterns that could guide the administration’s decision-making on everything from faculty career paths to financial aid.

但在他弄清楚如何帮助这些弱势学生之前，劳德首先得找出他们是谁。对于一门化学课，这项任务相对简单，但鉴于每年有超过7000名新生进入校园，找出最脆弱的个体是一大挑战。劳德求助于教导处新组建的一个名为“院校研究”的数据团队。就像每一所大型综合大学一样，德州大学早就拥有一支专门编撰统计数据，并按照政府要求发表报告的研究团队。但院校研究团队的独特之处在于，它使该校具备了一个内特·希尔(Nate Silver，著名统计学家)时代的数据部门。这群年轻的统计学家和程序员致力于预测分析，从数十年的海量学生数据中寻找规律，并据此指引学校管理者的各种决策——从教师队伍的职业路径，到给予学生的经济资助。

Laude wanted something that would help him predict, for any given incoming freshman, how likely he or she would be to graduate in four years. The Institutional Research team analyzed the performance of tens of thousands of recent U.T. students, and from that analysis they produced a tool they called the Dashboard — an algorithm, in spreadsheet form, that would consider 14 variables, from an incoming student’s family income to his SAT score to his class rank to his parents’ educational background, and then immediately spit out a probability, to the second decimal place, of how likely he was to graduate in four years.

劳德想要一种能够帮助他预测一位新生四年后有多大几率毕业的工具。院校研究团队对近年数万名德州大学学生的表现进行了分析，然后根据分析结果设计了一种他们称为“仪表板”(Dashboard)的工具。这种采用电子表格形式的算法考虑14个变量，从一位新生的家庭收入，到他或她的SAT成绩，班级名次，再到其父母的教育背景，随后立即给出一个精确到小数点后第二位的概率，显示他或她在四年后有多大几率顺利毕业。

In the spring of 2013, Laude and his staff sat down with the Dashboard to analyze the 7,200 high-school seniors who had just been admitted to the class of 2017. When they ran the students’ data, the Dashboard indicated that 1,200 of them — including Vanessa Brewer — had less than a 40 percent chance of graduation on time. Those were the kids Laude decided to target. He assigned them each to one or more newly created or expanded interventions. The heart of the project is a portfolio of “student success programs,” each one tailored, to a certain extent, for a different college at U.T. — natural sciences, liberal arts, engineering — but all of them following the basic TIP model Laude dreamed up 15 years ago: small classes, peer mentoring, extra tutoring help, engaged faculty advisers and community-building exercises.

2013年春天，劳德和他的同事开始使用“仪表板”分析7200名刚刚被录取到2017届班级的高三学生。输入这些学生的数据后，“仪表板”随即显示，大约1200名学生(其中就包括凡妮莎·布鲁尔)按时毕业的几率不到40%。他们就是劳德决定锁定的帮助对象。劳德给他们每人安排了一项或多项新创建或扩充的干预措施，这个项目的核心是一组“学生成功方案”。尽管每套方案在一定程度上针对德州大学的不同院系(包括自然科学、人文社会科学和工程技术等)量身定制，但它们都遵循劳德15年前开创的TIP计划的基本模式：小班教学、同辈指导、额外辅导帮助、密切接触的指导老师，以及社区构建活动。

Laude’s most intensive and innovative intervention, though, is the University Leadership Network, a new scholarship program that aims to develop not academic skills but leadership skills. In order to be selected for U.L.N., incoming freshmen must not only fall below the 40-percent cutoff on the Dashboard; they must also have what the financial-aid office calls unmet financial need. In practice, this means that students in U.L.N. are almost all from families with incomes below the national median. (When you enter a family income at that level into the Dashboard, the predicted on-time graduation rate falls even further; for U.L.N. students, Laude estimates, it is more like 20 percent than 40 percent.) The 500 freshmen in U.L.N. perform community service, take part in discussion groups and attend weekly lectures on topics like time management and team building. The lectures have a grown-up, formal feel; students are required to wear business attire. In later years, U.L.N. students will serve in internships on campus and move into leadership positions as mentors or residence-hall advisers or student government officials. In exchange for all this, they receive a $5,000 scholarship every year, paid in monthly increments.

不过，劳德推出的强度最大、也最具创新的干预手段是大学领导力网络(University Leadership Network，简称ULN)，这个全新的奖学金项目旨在开发学生的领导技能，而不是学业技能。入选ULN网络的新生既必须在“仪表板”上低于40%的门槛，还得具有经济援助办公室所称的“未获满足的经济需要”。在实践中，这意味着ULN学生几乎全部来自收入低于全国中位数的家庭。(当一位新生的家庭收入处于那个层级时，“仪表板”显示的按时毕业几率进一步下降;对于ULN学生来说，劳德估计，这个几率更有可能是20%，而不是40%。)500名入选 ULN的新生必须从事社区服务，参与小组讨论，每周参加时间管理和团队建设等主题的讲座。这些讲座带有一种成年人的，非常正式的气氛;学生们必须身着商务装。在随后几年，ULN学生将从事校园实习工作，出任导师、学生宿舍顾问或学生会干部等领导岗位。这一切的回报是，他们每年获得一笔5000美元的奖学金，按月支付。

Perhaps the most striking fact about the success programs is that the selection criteria are never disclosed to students. “From a numbers perspective, the students in these programs are all in the bottom quartile,” Laude explained. “But here’s the key — none of them know that they’re in the bottom quartile.” The first rule of the Dashboard, in other words, is that you never talk about the Dashboard. Laude says he assumes that most U.L.N. students understand on some level that they were chosen in part because of their financial need, but he says it is important for the university to play down that fact when dealing directly with students. It is an extension of the basic psychological strategy that he has used ever since that first TIP program: Select the students who are least likely to do well, but in all your communications with them, convey the idea that you have selected them for this special program not because you fear they will fail, but because you are confident they can succeed.

这些“学生成功方案” 最引人注目的事实或许是，选择标准永远不会透露给学生。“从数字视角看，这些方案中的学生全都处于最低的四分之一，”劳德解释说。“但关键在于，他们都不知道自己处于最低的四分之一。” 换句话说，“仪表板”的首要规则是，你永远不谈论“仪表板”。劳德表示，他假设大多数ULN学生在一定程度上知道，自己被选中的部分原因是自己需要经济资助，但他说，校方在跟学生打交道时有必要淡化这一点。这是自推出首个TIP计划以来，他一直使用的基本心理策略的一种延伸：选择最不可能表现优秀的学生，但在与他们的所有沟通中，务必要传达这样一种理念，即你挑选他们参加这个特殊计划，并不是因为你担心他们将失败，而是因为你深信他们能够成功。

Which, from Laude’s perspective, has the virtue of being true. I sat with him in his office one morning in late January, not long after students had arrived back on campus for the spring semester. The university was closed for the day because of a freak ice storm, and he and I were more or less alone in the administration building, a huge clock tower in the center of campus. We were talking about his experience in Sewanee, specifically a low moment almost exactly 38 years earlier when he arrived back on campus for spring semester of his freshman year, plagued with doubt, longing to give up and go home. “Everybody has moments like that,” Laude said. “There are probably 50 or 60 kids in the U.L.N. who are on academic probation right now. They’re coming back, and we’ve got all these great support networks set up for them. But still, there’s got to be a part of them that is afraid, a part of them that wonders if they can make it. My bet is that the vast majority of them will make it. And they will, because nobody will give them the chance to simply give up.”

在劳德看来，这种信念的优点在于它是真话。1月下旬的一天上午，我坐在劳德的办公室里，学生们在不久前重返校园，开始春季学期。由于一场诡异的冰暴来袭，那天学校停课，位于校园中心、作为行政大楼的巨大钟楼空荡荡的，几乎只剩下我们两个人。我跟劳德谈起他在南方大学的求学经历，特别是差不多刚好38 年前那个人生低谷，当时，重返校园开始大一学年春季学期的他，饱受自我怀疑的折磨，内心很想放弃学业，一走了之。“每个人都会经历那样的低谷，”劳德说。 “大约50至60名ULN学生目前处于留校察看期。他们返回了校园，而我们为他们准备了所有这些强大的支持网络。但话说回来，他们仍然会感到害怕，怀疑自己能否完成学业。我敢打赌，他们当中的绝大多数人最终将品尝到成功的滋味。他们会的，因为没有人会给他们轻易放弃的机会。”

Though Laude is a chemist by training, he spends much of his time thinking like a psychologist, pondering what kind of messages or environmental cues might affect the decisions that the students in his programs make. He’s the first to admit that he is an amateur psychologist at best. But he has found an ally and a kindred spirit in a psychological researcher at U.T. named David Yeager, a 32-year-old assistant professor who is emerging as one of the world’s leading experts on the psychology of education. In his research, Yeager is trying to answer the question that Laude wrestles with every day: How, precisely, do you motivate students to take the steps they need to take in order to succeed?

虽然劳德是一位科班出身的化学家，但在很多时候，他的思维方式更像是一位心理学家，沉思什么样的信息或环境因素可能影响他在帮助的那些学生们的决策。他坦然承认自己最多是个业余心理学家。但他在德州大学找到了一位志趣相投的盟友：32岁的心理学研究者戴维·耶格尔(David Yeager)，这位年轻的助理教授正在成为教育心理学领域的世界级专家之一。他的研究试图回答劳德每天都在捉摸的问题：你究竟该怎样激励学生迈出成功所需的步子?

Before he arrived at U.T. in the winter of 2012, Yeager worked as a graduate student in the psychology department at Stanford, during an era when that department had become a hotbed of new thinking on the psychology of education. Leading researchers like Carol Dweck, Claude Steele and Hazel Markus were using experimental methods to delve into the experience of students from early childhood all the way through college. To the extent that the Stanford researchers shared a unifying vision, it was the belief that students were often blocked from living up to their potential by the presence of certain fears and anxieties and doubts about their ability. These feelings were especially virulent at moments of educational transition — like the freshman year of high school or the freshman year of college. And they seemed to be particularly debilitating among members of groups that felt themselves to be under some special threat or scrutiny: women in engineering programs, first-generation college students, African-Americans in the Ivy League.

2012年冬天来德州大学之前，耶格尔在斯坦福大学(Stanford University)以研究生的身份从事心理学研究。在那段时期，斯坦福心理学系异军突起，成为教育心理学新思维的温床。卡罗尔·德伟克(Carol Dweck)、克劳德·斯蒂尔(Claude Steele)和黑兹尔·马库斯(Hazel Markus)等顶级心理学家采用实验性方法，来探究学生从幼儿时期一直到大学时代的经历。在某种程度上，这些斯坦福大学研究人员共享着一个理念：某些恐惧和焦虑情绪，以及对自身能力的怀疑，往往阻止学生实现自己的潜能。在升学过渡阶段，比如高一或大一学年，这些情绪尤为致命。而在那些感觉自己受到某种特殊威胁或审视的学生群体(工程专业女生、第一代大学生，或常春藤盟校的非洲裔美国学生)中，此类情绪似乎特别有破坏力。

The negative thoughts took different forms in each individual, of course, but they mostly gathered around two ideas. One set of thoughts was about belonging. Students in transition often experienced profound doubts about whether they really belonged — or could ever belong — in their new institution. The other was connected to ability. Many students believed in what Carol Dweck had named an entity theory of intelligence — that intelligence was a fixed quality that was impossible to improve through practice or study. And so when they experienced cues that might suggest that they weren’t smart or academically able — a bad grade on a test, for instance — they would often interpret those as a sign that they could never succeed. Doubts about belonging and doubts about ability often fed on each other, and together they created a sense of helplessness. That helplessness dissuaded students from taking any steps to change things. Why study if I can’t get smarter? Why go out and meet new friends if no one will want to talk to me anyway? Before long, the nagging doubts became self-fulfilling prophecies.

当然，这些消极想法在每个人身上的表现形式有所不同，不过它们大多围绕着两个想法。一组想法跟“归属感”有关。升学过渡期的学生经常会深切地怀疑，自己是否真的属于(或者终有一天会属于)这个陌生的新学府。另一组想法跟“能力”有关。许多学生深信卡罗尔·德伟克所称的“智力实体论”，即智力是一种固定质素，不可能通过练习或学习予以改善。所以，当这些学生遭遇一些可能显示他们不够聪明，或者不具备学术能力的蛛丝马迹(比如某次测验成绩不理想)时，他们往往将其解读为一个迹象，说明他们永远也无法成功。对归属感和自身能力的疑虑经常相互强化，最终形成一种深切的无助感。这种无助感导致学生不愿意采取任何改变现状的行动。要是我不能变得更聪明，为什么还要学习?要是没有人愿意跟我聊天，为什么还要出门，试图结识新朋友?过不了多久，这些令人泄气的疑虑就会变成自我实现的预言。

When Yeager arrived at Stanford in 2006, many of the researchers there had begun to move beyond trying to understand this phenomenon to trying to counteract it. In a series of experiments, they found that certain targeted messages, delivered to students in the right way at the right time, seemed to overcome the doubts about belonging and ability that were undermining the students’ academic potential.

当耶格尔在2006年来到斯坦福大学的时候，该校的许多研究人员已经开始试图反制这种现象，而不仅仅是理解它。他们在一系列的实验中发现，某些针对性的信息，如果能够在恰当的时间以恰当的方式传递给学生，似乎能够克服他们对归属感和自身能力的疑虑，而此类疑虑正在破坏他们的学术潜能。

Yeager began working with a professor of social psychology named Greg Walton, who had identified principles that seemed to govern which messages, and which methods of delivering those messages, were most persuasive to students. For instance, messages worked better if they appealed to social norms; when college students are informed that most students don’t take part in binge drinking, they’re less likely to binge-drink themselves. Messages were also more effective if they were delivered in a way that allowed the recipients a sense of autonomy. If you march all the high-school juniors into the auditorium and force them to watch a play about tolerance and inclusion, they’re less likely to take the message to heart than if they feel as if they are independently seeking it out. And positive messages are more effectively absorbed when they are experienced through what Walton called “self-persuasion”: if students watch a video or read an essay with a particular message and then write their own essay or make their own video to persuade future students, they internalize the message more deeply.

耶格尔开始与社会心理学教授格雷格·沃尔顿(Greg Walton)合作。沃尔顿此前总结出的一些原则似乎说明了哪些信息，以及传递这些信息的方法，对学生最有说服力。比如，如果这些信息诉诸于社会规范，其效果往往更好;当大学生们被告知，大多数学生并不参与狂饮时，他们自己就不太可能狂喝滥饮。如果这些信息的传递方式让接收者有一种自主感，效果也会更好。如果你发号施令地让所有高二学生列队前往学校礼堂，要他们观看一部以宽容和包容为主题的戏剧，相比他们觉得自己在独立地探寻这些信息，他们接受这些信息的可能性更小一些。此外，当学生经历沃尔顿所称的“自我说服”过程时，正面信息可以被更有效地吸收。比如，如果学生观看一段视频或者阅读一篇带有特定信息的文章，然后自己写一篇文章或者制作一段视频来劝说未来的学生，他们就能够把相关信息更加深入地内在化。

In one experiment after another, Yeager and Walton’s methods produced remarkable results. At an elite Northeastern college, Walton, along with another Stanford researcher named Geoffrey Cohen, conducted an experiment in which first-year students read brief essays by upperclassmen recalling their own experiences as freshmen. The upperclassmen conveyed in their own words a simple message about belonging: “When I got here, I thought I was the only one who felt left out. But then I found out that everyone feels that way at first, and everyone gets over it. I got over it, too.” After reading the essays, the students in the experiment then wrote their own essays and made videos for future students, echoing the same message. The whole intervention took no more than an hour. It had no apparent effect on the white students who took part in the experiment. But it had a transformative effect on the college careers of the African-American students in the study: Compared with a control group, the experiment tripled the percentage of black students who earned G.P.A.s in the top quarter of their class, and it cut in half the black-white achievement gap in G.P.A. It even had an impact on the students’ health — the black students who received the belonging message had significantly fewer doctor visits three years after the intervention.

在一次又一次实验中，耶格尔和沃尔顿的方法收到了显著效果。在美国东北部一所名牌院校，沃尔顿和另一位名叫杰弗里·科恩(Geoffrey Cohen)的斯坦福大学研究人员进行了一项实验。这项实验要求大一新生阅读高年级学生回顾自身大一经历的短文。这些学长用自己的语言传递了一个关于归属感的简单信息：“刚来到这里的时候，我以为我是唯一一个被冷落的新生。但我随后发现，每一位初来乍到的新生都有这种感觉，而每个人都克服了这道难关。我也挺过来了。”读完后，参与实验的学生随即面向未来的学生撰写短文，制作视频，呼应了同样的信息。整个干预过程花费了不到一个小时。它没有明显影响参加实验的白人学生，但对非洲裔学生的大学生涯产生了变革性影响：与一个对照组相比，这项实验助推平均绩点位列所在班级前四分之一的黑人学生比例增加了两倍，并且使黑人和白人学生的平均绩点差距收窄了一半。它甚至对学生的健康产生了影响——实施这项干预三年后，接到归属感信息的黑人学生求医的次数显著较少。

Next, Yeager did an experiment with 600 students just entering ninth grade at three high schools in Northern California. The intervention was 25 minutes long; students sat at a terminal in the school computer lab and read scientific articles and testimonials from older students with another simple message: People change. If someone is being mean to you or excluding you, the essays explained, it was most likely a temporary thing; it wasn’t because of any permanent trait in him or you. Yeager chose ninth grade because it is well known as a particularly bad time for the onset of depression — generally, depression rates double over the transition to high school. Indeed, among the control group in Yeager’s experiment, symptoms of depression rose by 39 percent during that school year. Among the group who had received the message that people change, though, there was no significant increase in depressive symptoms. The intervention didn’t cure anyone’s depression, in other words, but it did stop the appearance of depressive symptoms during a traditionally depressive period. And it did so in just 25 minutes of treatment.

接下来，耶格尔针对北加州三所高中600名刚刚进入九年级的学生做了一项实验。这次干预的时间长度为25分钟;这些学生坐在学校计算机实验室的电脑终端前，阅读科学文章和高年级学生撰写的个人证词，其内容包含另一个简单的信息：人是会变的。这些文章解释说，如果有人对你刻薄，或者排挤你，那很有可能只是暂时的，而不是因为他或者你身上具有某种永久性的特质。耶格尔选择九年级学生的原因在于一个已知的事实：这是一个抑郁症高发的时间点——大致而言，在进入高中的过渡期，抑郁症的发病率会翻一番。的确，在对照组的学生中，抑郁症症状在该学年增长了39%。然而，在这个收到“人是会变的”这一信息的学生群体中，抑郁症症状并没有显著增加。换句话说，这项干预并没有治愈任何人的抑郁症，但在一个传统的抑郁症高发期，它确实遏止了抑郁症症状的出现。而收到这个效果只花费了短短25分钟。

After the depression study, Yeager, Walton and two other researchers did an experiment with community-college students who were enrolled in remedial or “developmental” math classes. Education advocates have identified remedial math in community college as a particularly devastating obstacle to the college hopes of many students, especially low-income students, who disproportionately attend community college. The statistics are daunting: About two-thirds of all community-college students are placed into one or more remedial math classes, and unless they pass those classes, they can’t graduate. More than two-thirds of them don’t pass; instead, they often drop out of college altogether.

抑郁症研究结束后，耶格尔、沃尔顿和其他两名研究人员针对社区学院中被纳入补习或“发展”数学课的学生进行了一项实验。教育倡导者早已指出，社区学院的数学补习计划是许多学生实现大学梦的一个破坏力特别大的障碍，特别是对作为社区学院主体的低收入家庭学生而言。相关统计数据看上去非常可怕：大约三分之二的社区学院学生被要求参加一个或多个数学补习班，他们必须通过这些课程，否则就不能毕业。其中超过三分之二的学生没有通过;相反，他们往往彻底放弃高校学业。

Clearly, part of the developmental-math crisis has to do with the fact that many students aren’t receiving a good-enough math education in middle or high school and are graduating from high school underprepared for college math. But Yeager and Walton and a growing number of other researchers believe that another significant part of the problem is psychological. They echo David Laude’s intuition from the early days of TIP: When you send college students the message that they’re not smart enough to be in college — and it’s hard not to get that message when you’re placed into a remedial math class as soon as you arrive on campus — those students internalize that idea about themselves.

发展数学课危机在某种程度上显然跟一个事实有关：许多学生在初中或高中阶段没有得到足够好的数学教育，高中毕业时的数学水平不足以应对大学数学课程。但耶格尔和沃尔顿，以及越来越多的其他研究人员认为，这个问题的另一大原因是心理层面的。他们呼应了戴维·劳德当初推出TIP计划时的直觉：如果你给大学生传递这样一个信息，即他们的聪明程度不足以进入大学——如果一位学生刚踏入校门就被分配到一个数学补习班，他或她很难不得到这个信息——这些学生就会把这种评价内在化。

In the experiment, 288 community-college students enrolled in developmental math were randomly assigned, at the beginning of the semester, to read one of two articles. The control group read a generic article about the brain. The treatment group read an article that laid out the scientific evidence against the entity theory of intelligence. “When people learn and practice new ways of doing algebra or statistics,” the article explained, “it can grow their brains — even if they haven’t done well in math in the past.” After reading the article, the students wrote a mentoring letter to future students explaining its key points. The whole exercise took 30 minutes, and there was no follow-up of any kind. But at the end of the semester, 20 percent of the students in the control group had dropped out of developmental math, compared with just 9 percent of the treatment group. In other words, a half-hour online intervention, done at almost no cost, had apparently cut the community-college math dropout rate by more than half.

在这项试验中，288名被要求参加发展数学课的社区学院学生，在开学伊始被随机分成两组，分别阅读两篇不同的文章。对照组阅读一篇谈论大脑的一般性文章。实验组阅读一篇列举科学证据驳斥“智力实体论”的文章。“当人们学习和练习做代数或统计题的新方法时，”这篇文章解释说，“他们的大脑会变得更发达 ——即使他们过去没有学好数学这门课。”读完这篇文章后，学生们给未来学生写了一封解释文中要点的指导性信件。整个过程耗时30分钟，而且没有任何跟进措施。但在学期结束时，20%的对照组学生已经退出发展数学课，而仅有9%的实验组学生做出了这种选择。换句话说，一项持续了仅仅半小时，几乎没有任何成本的在线干预，显然把社区学院的数学辍学率削减了一半多。

Soon after Yeager arrived at the University of Texas, in the winter of 2012, he got an email from a vice provost at the university named Gretchen Ritter, who had heard about his work and wanted to learn more. At Ritter’s invitation, Yeager gave a series of presentations to various groups of administrators at the university; each time, he mentioned that he and Walton were beginning to test whether interventions that addressed students’ anxieties about ability and belonging could improve the transition to college, especially for first-generation students. Ritter asked Yeager if the approach might work in Austin. Could he create an intervention not for just a few hundred students, but for every incoming U.T. freshman? In theory, yes, Yeager told her. But at that scale, it would need to be done online. And if he did it, he said, he would want to do it as a randomized controlled experiment, so he and Walton could collect valuable new data on what worked. In April 2012, Ritter asked Yeager to test his intervention on the more than 8,000 teenagers who made up the newly admitted U.T. class of 2016. It would be one of the largest randomized experiments ever undertaken by social or developmental psychologists. And it would need to be ready to go in three weeks.

2012年冬天，刚刚抵达德州大学没多久的耶格尔，就收到了该校副教务长格雷琴·里特(Gretchen Ritter)发来的一封电子邮件。里特此前听说过他的研究，希望了解更多情况。应里特的邀请，耶格尔给该校各院系的管理者做了一系列演讲。每次他都会提到，他和沃尔顿已开始测试，旨在解决学生对自身能力和归属感疑虑的干预手段，能否改善大学生(特别是第一代大学生)刚刚踏入校门后的升学过渡期?里特问他，这种方式是否有可能在奥斯汀奏效?他能否创建一种不仅针对几百名学生，而是针对每一位德州大学新生的干预手段?理论上可行，耶格尔告诉她。但鉴于规模如此之大，这项实验需要在网上进行。他说，如果要做的话，他想把它做成一项随机对照试验，这样他和沃尔顿就能收集关于哪些方法管用的宝贵数据。2012年 4月，里特请耶格尔测试他的干预手段，对象是刚刚被录取为德州大学2016届学生的逾8000名青少年。这将是有史以来社会或发展心理学家开展的最大规模随机实验之一。而这项实验需要在三个星期后准备就绪。

Yeager was already feeling overwhelmed. He and his wife had just moved to Austin. Three weeks earlier, they had their second child. He was swamped with lingering commitments from Stanford and scrambling to stay on top of the classes he was teaching for the first time. But he was painfully aware of the statistics on the graduation gaps at U.T., and he had enough faith in the interventions that he and Walton were developing to think that a well-orchestrated large-scale version could make a difference. “I went home to Margot, my wife,” he told me, “and I said: ‘O.K., I know I’m already overworked. I know I’m already never at home. But bear with me for three more weeks. Because this has the potential to be one of the most important things I ever do.’ ”

耶格尔当时已经不堪重负。他和妻子刚搬到奥斯汀。他们的第二个孩子刚刚在三个星期前出生。他的工作可谓千头万绪，一方面，对斯坦福大学的承诺尚未了结，另一方面，他正在竭力教好他首次执教的课程。但他痛苦地意识到德州大学的毕业率差距，并对自己和沃尔顿正在开发的干预手段充满信心，认为一个精心策划的大型版本有望扭转局面。他告诉我，“回到家中，我对太太玛戈说，‘好吧，我知道我的工作已经超负荷了。我也知道我已经很少在家。但请再给我三个星期。因为这或许将成为我一辈子最重要的事情之一。’”

Yeager immediately began holding focus groups and one-on-one discussions with current U.T. students, trying to get a clearer understanding of which messages would work best at U.T. It’s an important point to remember about these interventions, and one Yeager often emphasizes: Even though the basic messages about belonging and ability recur from one intervention to the next, he and Walton believe that the language of the message needs to be targeted to the particular audience for each intervention. The anxieties that a high-achieving African-American freshman at an Ivy League college might experience are distinct from the anxieties experienced by a community-college student who was just placed into remedial math.

耶格尔立即开始主办焦点小组，并与在校的德州大学学生进行一对一讨论，试图更清晰地了解在德州大学哪些信息将获得最佳效果。耶格尔经常强调指出，实施这些干预手段时，务必要记得：即使与归属感和自身能力相关的基本信息在一个接一个干预中反复出现，但他和沃尔顿认为，这些信息的措辞需要针对每项干预的特定受众。一位成绩优异的非洲裔新生在一所常青藤盟校可能感受到的焦虑，迥异于一位刚刚被安排参加数学补习班的社区学院学生感受到的焦虑。

Yeager and Ritter decided that the best way to deliver the chosen messages to the incoming students was to make them a part of the online pre-orientation that every freshman was required to complete before arriving on campus. That May, rising freshmen began receiving the usual welcome-to-U.T. emails from the registrar’s office, inviting them to log on to U.T.’s website and complete a series of forms and tasks. Wedged in between the information about the meningococcal vaccine requirements and the video about the U.T. honor code was a link to Yeager’s interactive presentation about the “U.T. Mindset.”

耶格尔和里特决定，向新生传递选定信息的最佳方式，是将它们夹在每位新生在踏入校门前必须在网上完成的入学前准备(pre- orientation)的内容中。当年5月份，即将入学的新生们陆续收到德州大学招生办公室发来的欢迎入学邮件，邀请他们登录德州大学网站，完成一系列表格和任务。有关接种脑膜炎疫苗的要求和介绍德州大学荣誉准则的视频之间夹着一个链接，点击该链接就可进入耶格尔设计的互动演示内容，其主题是“德州大学观念模式”。

Students were randomly sorted into four categories. A “belonging” treatment group read messages from current students explaining that they felt alone and excluded when they arrived on campus, but then realized that everyone felt that way and eventually began to feel at home. A “mind-set” treatment group read an article about the malleability of the brain and how practice makes it grow new connections, and then read messages from current students stating that when they arrived at U.T., they worried about not being smart enough, but then learned that when they studied they grew smarter. A combination treatment group received a hybrid of the belonging and mind-set presentations. And finally, a control group read fairly banal reflections from current students stating that they were surprised by Austin’s culture and weather when they first arrived, but eventually they got used to them. Students in each group were asked, after clicking through a series of a dozen or so web pages, to write their own reflections on what they’d read in order to help future students. The whole intervention took between 25 and 45 minutes for students to complete, and more than 90 percent of the incoming class completed it.

学生们被随机分成四类。“归属感”实验组阅读在校生传递的信息，这些在校生解释说，刚到达校园时，他们很孤单，觉得自己被排斥在外，但随后意识到每个人都是这种感觉，最终开始觉得像在家一样自在。“观念模式”实验组阅读一篇讲述大脑可塑性，以及练习怎样促使大脑建立新连接的文章，然后阅读在校生传递的信息，称刚来到德州大学时，他们担心自己不够聪明，但随后意识到，随着他们投入学习，他们会变得更聪明。综合实验组则收到一个既包括归属感信息、又包括观念模式信息的陈述。最后，对照组学生阅读一组由在校生撰写的泛泛而谈的感言，称刚来到这里时，奥斯丁校园的文化和天气让他们感到惊讶，但最终还是适应了这里的氛围。点击读完十几个网页后，每组学生都被要求写一篇读后感，以帮助未来的学生。整个过程需要学生花费大约25到45分钟，超过90%的新生完成了这项实验。

Going in, Yeager thought of the 2012 experiment as a pilot — simply a way to test out the mechanics of a large-scale intervention. He didn’t have much confidence that it would produce significant results, so he was surprised when, at the end of the fall semester, he looked at the data regarding which students had successfully completed at least 12 credits. First-semester credit-completion has always been an early indicator of the gaps that appear later for U.T. students. Every year, only 81 or 82 percent of “disadvantaged” freshmen — meaning, in this study, those who are black, Latino or first-generation — complete those 12 credits by Christmas, compared with about 90 percent of more advantaged students.

耶格尔最初是把2012年这场实验作为一个试点来做的，只不过是想测试大规模干预活动的运作机制。至于这场实验能否产生显著的成果，他并没有多大信心。所以，在秋季学期结束时，当耶格尔看到哪些学生已经成功完成至少12个学分的相关数据时，他感到惊讶。第一学期的学分完成情况，向来是预测德州大学学生日后学业差距的早期指标。每年，在“弱势”新生(在这项研究中，他们大多是黑人，非洲裔或第一代大学生)中，只有81%或82%的人能够在圣诞节前修完 12个学分，而条件较好的学生完成这些学分的比例高达90%左右。

In January 2013, when Yeager analyzed the first-semester data, he saw the advantaged students’ results were exactly the same as they were every year. No matter which message they saw in the pre-orientation presentation, 90 percent of that group was on track. Similarly, the disadvantaged students in the control group, who saw the bland message about adjusting to Austin’s culture and weather, did the same as disadvantaged students usually did: 82 percent were on track. But the disadvantaged students who had experienced the belonging and mind-set messages did significantly better: 86 percent of them had completed 12 credits or more by Christmas. They had cut the gap between themselves and the advantaged students in half.

2013年1月，当耶格尔分析第一个学期数据的时候，他发现条件较好学生的成绩跟往年一模一样。无论他们在入学前互动演示内容中看到哪一类信息，90%的学生保持在学业正轨上。同样，对照组中的弱势学生(也就是那些看到了如何适应奥斯丁校园文化和天气等泛泛而谈信息的学生)的表现也一如往常：82%的学生保持在学业正轨上。但那些接收到归属感和观念模式信息的弱势学生的表现显著改善：他们当中86%的人在圣诞节前完成了12个或更多的学分。这意味着，他们将自己与条件较好学生的差距缩小了一半。

A rise of four percentage points might not seem like much of a revolution. And Yeager and Walton are certainly not declaring victory yet. But if the effect of the intervention persists over the next three years (as it did in the elite-college study), it could mean hundreds of first-generation students graduating from U.T. in 2016 who otherwise wouldn’t have graduated on time, if ever. It would go a long way toward helping David Laude meet his goals. And all from a one-time intervention that took 45 minutes to complete. The U.T. administration was encouraged; beginning this month, the “U.T. Mindset” intervention will be part of the pre-orientation for all 7,200 members of the incoming class of 2018.

上升4个百分点貌似算不上一场革命。耶格尔和沃尔顿肯定不会就此宣告胜利。但如果这项干预的效果在未来三年期间持续存在(就像在那所东北部名校开展的研究那样)，它可能意味着在2016年，有数百名本来无法按时毕业，甚至永远不会毕业的第一代大学生获得德州大学学位。这将大大有助于戴维·劳德实现他的目标。而这一切都来自仅需45分钟完成的一次性干预。德州大学管理层深受鼓舞;从本月开始，“德州大学观念模式”干预将成为2018届全部7200名新生入学前准备的一部分。

When Yeager and Walton present their work to fellow researchers, the first reaction they often hear is that their results can’t possibly be true. Early on, they each had a scientific paper or grants rejected not because there were flaws in their data or their methodology, but simply because people didn’t believe that such powerful effects could come from such minimal interventions. Yeager admits that their data can seem unbelievable — they contradict many of our essential assumptions about how the human mind works. But he can articulate an entirely plausible explanation for what’s happening when students hear or read these messages, whether they’re at U.T. or in community college or in ninth grade.

当耶格尔和沃尔顿向其他研究人员展示他们的研究成果时，他们经常听到的第一反应是，这些成果不可能是真的。他们两人早前都有过科学论文投稿或经费申请被拒的经历，这倒不是因为他们的数据或研究方法存在什么缺陷，而仅仅是因为人们不相信，如此强大的效果竟然出自如此微小的干预。耶格尔承认，他们的数据可能看上去令人难以置信——它们违背了很多有关人脑思维方式的基本假设。但他可以对学生们听到或读到这些信息之后发生的事情做出一个完全可信的解释，无论他们是德州大学或某个社区学院的大学生，还是九年级学生。

Our first instinct, when we read about these experiments, is that what the interventions must be doing is changing students’ minds — replacing one deeply held belief with another. And it is hard to imagine that reading words on a computer screen for 25 minutes could possibly do that. People just aren’t that easy to persuade. But Yeager believes that the interventions are not in fact changing students’ minds — they are simply keeping them from overinterpreting discouraging events that might happen in the future. “We don’t prevent you from experiencing those bad things,” Yeager explains. “Instead, we try to change the meaning of them, so that they don’t mean to you that things are never going to get better.”

在我们读到这些实验的结果时，我们的第一个本能反应是，这些干预肯定改变了学生的观念——用另一种信念代替了一种根深蒂固的信念。很难想象，在电脑屏幕上阅读25分钟的文字有可能做到这一点。人是没有那么容易被说服的。但耶格尔认为，这些干预其实没有改变学生的观念，只是让他们不去过度解读未来可能发生的令人沮丧的事件。“我们无法阻止你遭遇那些不好的事情，”耶格尔解释说。“相反，我们试图改变它们的意义，使它们不至于对你意味着情况永远不会好转。”

Every college freshman — rich or poor, white or minority, first-generation or legacy — experiences academic setbacks and awkward moments when they feel they don’t belong. But white students and wealthy students and students with college-graduate parents tend not to take those moments too seriously or too personally. Sure, they still feel bad when they fail a test or get in a fight with a roommate or are turned down for a date. But in general, they don’t interpret those setbacks as a sign that they don’t belong in college or that they’re not going to succeed there.

每个大一新生——不论贫富，白人或少数族裔，是不是第一代大学生——都会经历学业挫折，经历让他们觉得自己不属于校园环境的尴尬时刻。但白人学生、富裕学生以及父母接受过高等教育的学生，往往不太把这些时刻当回事，或者说不太往心里去。没错，当他们测验不及格，跟室友吵架，或者约会被拒时，他们的心情同样很糟糕。但他们通常不会认为，这些挫折说明自己不属于高等学府，或者自己无法完成学业。

It is only students facing the particular fears and anxieties and experiences of exclusion that come with being a minority — whether by race or by class — who are susceptible to this problem. Those students often misinterpret temporary setbacks as a permanent indication that they can’t succeed or don’t belong at U.T. For those students, the intervention can work as a kind of inoculation. And when, six months or two years later, the germs of self-doubt try to infect them, the lingering effect of the intervention allows them to shrug off those doubts exactly the way the advantaged students do.

只有那些因自己的少数群体身份(无论是种族方面，还是阶层方面)而面临特殊的恐惧和焦虑，有过受排斥经历的学生，才容易受这类问题影响。这些学生往往将暂时的挫折误解为一种永久性的指标，说明他们不可能在德州大学获得成功，或者根本就不属于这里。对于这些学生来说，干预的作用就像是一剂预防针。半年或两年后，当自我怀疑的病菌试图感染他们的时候，干预的残留效果让他们能够摆脱那些疑虑，就像条件较好的学生所做的那样。

When I spoke with Vanessa Brewer in January, she was deep in the grip of those doubts. She had made it through the fall with a perfectly decent 3.0 G.P.A., and she even pulled out a B-plus in statistics, but she looked back on it as a very difficult stretch. “I felt like no one really believed in me,” she said. Her mother was the only person she really confided in, but even those conversations sometimes made her feel more aware of the lack of a support system around her. “She told me I sounded different,” Vanessa said. “She was like: ‘Are you O.K.? Are you taking care of yourself?’ I’m normally a pretty happy person, but I guess when I called her, it was more monotone, uninterested.”

今年1月，当我跟凡妮莎·布鲁尔交谈的时候，她正深受这些疑虑折磨。在刚刚过去的秋季学期，她的平均绩点是3.0，这是一个相当不错的成绩。她甚至在统计课考试中得了一个B+，但她觉得那是一段非常难熬的时期。“我觉得没有人真的对我抱有信心，”她说。母亲是她唯一的倾诉对象，但就连这些谈话有时也让凡妮莎更加意识到，自己的周围缺少一个支持系统。“她告诉我，我听起来有点不一样，” 凡妮莎说，“她总是问我：‘你还好吧?能照顾好自己吗?’我通常是个很快乐的人，但我猜想，给妈妈打电话时，我的声音很单调，听上去有点冷淡。”

When Vanessa thought about the semester ahead of her, she felt stressed out, and she told me that her anxiety about whether she belonged at U.T. was with her every time she stepped into a classroom. “Everybody else seems like they have it in the bag,” she said. “They look intimidating, even when they’re just sitting in class — even the way they’re taking notes. They seem so confident. I sometimes feel like I am the only one who is lost, you know?”

展望即将开始的新学期，凡妮莎觉得压力太大了。她告诉我，每次走进教室时，她都有一种焦虑感：自己是否属于德州大学?“别人都是一副踌躇满志的样子，”她说。“他们看上去令人生畏，即便他们只是坐在教室里，即便只是他们记笔记的样子。他们看上去是那么信心满满。你知道吗?我有时觉得自己是唯一不知所措的人。”

But as the spring semester progressed, things started to look up for Vanessa. She was taking the dreaded Chemistry 301, and while she found it a real challenge, she was also determined not to fall behind. She was enrolled in U.L.N. and in Discovery Scholars, another of the programs David Laude oversaw, and her advisers arranged for her to get free help at the campus tutoring center. She spent six or more hours there each week, going over chemistry problems, and by March she was getting A’s and B’s on every test.

但在春季学期开始后，凡妮莎的境遇逐渐改观。她开始攻读可怕的《化学301》课，尽管她发现这门课是一个真正的挑战，但她也抱定了跟上学业的决心。她参加了ULN网络，以及戴维·劳德负责的另一个计划——“发现学者”(Discovery Scholars)。凡妮莎的顾问安排她在校园辅导中心获得免费帮助。她每周花费6小时或更多时间在那里复习化学功课，到3月份，她每次测验都获得了A或 B。

Gradually, Vanessa started to feel a greater sense of belonging. She told me about a day in February when she was hanging out in the Discovery Scholars office and suddenly had an impulse to “do a little networking.” She went up to the young woman working at the front desk, an African-American undergrad like Vanessa, and asked her on a whim if she knew any students in the nursing program. As it happened, the woman’s two best friends were in nursing, and they had just helped start an African-American nursing association at U.T.

渐渐地，凡妮莎开始感受到一种更大的归属感。她给我讲述了2月份某天的经历。那天，正在“发现学者”办公室闲着的凡妮莎突然产生了“交几个朋友”的冲动。她走到正在前台工作的年轻女子(像凡妮莎一样，她也是一位非洲裔本科生)跟前，突发奇想地问她是否认识哪位攻读护理课程的同学。很凑巧，这位女同学有两位最要好的朋友在护理专业，她们刚刚在德州大学帮助创建了一个非洲裔美国人护理协会。

Vanessa got their numbers and started texting with them, and they invited her to one of their meetings. They were juniors, a couple of years older than Vanessa, and they took her under their wing. “I like having someone to look up to,” Vanessa told me. “I felt like I was alone, but then I found people who said, you know, ‘I cried just like you.’ And it helped.”

获得电话号码后，凡妮莎开始跟她们进行短信交流，随后应邀参加她们的一个会议。这两位同学都是大三学生，比她大两岁，她们很快就接纳了凡妮莎。“拥有榜样的感觉真好，”凡妮莎告诉我，“我过去觉得自己形单影只，但随后发现有人说，‘我也像你一样大哭过。’我就感觉好些了。”

The messages about belonging and ability that Vanessa was hearing from her mentors and tutors weren’t the only things getting her through Chemistry 301, of course. But they were important in lots of subtle but meaningful ways, helping to steer her toward some seemingly small decisions that made a big difference in her prospects at U.T. Like walking into the tutoring center and asking for help. Or working up the nerve to ask a stranger if she knew any friendly nursing students.

当然，凡妮莎从她的同辈导师和指导老师那里听到的关于归属感和能力的信息，并不是帮助她通过《化学301》考试的唯一因素。然而，它们的重要性以许多细微而有意义的方式体现出来，引导凡妮莎做出一些看似微小、但对她在德州大学的发展前景颇有助益的决定，比如走进辅导中心寻求帮助，鼓起勇气询问一位陌生人是否认识护理专业的好友，等等。

I spoke to dozens of freshmen during the months I spent reporting in Austin, most of them, like Vanessa, enrolled in U.L.N. or another of Laude’s programs. And while each student’s story was different, it was remarkable how often the narratives of their freshman years followed the same arc: arriving on campus feeling confident because of their success in high school, then being laid low by an early failure. One student told me he fell into a depression and couldn’t sleep. Another said she lost weight and broke out in a rash. But then, sometimes after weeks or months of feeling lost and unhappy, most of them found their way back to a deeper kind of confidence. Often the support necessary for that recovery came from a U.L.N. adviser or a TIP mentor; sometimes it came from a family member or a church community or a roommate. But one way or another, almost all of the students I spoke to were able to turn things around, often pulling themselves back from some very low places.

在奥斯丁做报道的几个月期间，我采访了几十位大学新生，像凡妮莎一样，其中大多数人被招收到ULN或劳德负责的其他项目。虽然每个学生的故事有所不同，但值得注意的是，他们的新生学年基本上遵循相同的轨迹：刚进入校园时，高中时代的成功让他们满怀信心，但很快就被一次失败击垮。一位学生告诉我，他陷入了抑郁，严重失眠。另一个学生说，她的体重骤减，突发皮疹。 但随后，在经历了数周乃至数月的迷茫和郁闷之后，大多数人重拾一种更深层次的自信。通常情况下，这种复苏所需的支持来自某位ULN顾问或TIP导师;有时候，这种支持来自家人、教会团体或某位室友。但不管怎样，几乎所有接受我采访的学生都能够扭转局面，往往把自己从人生低谷拉回来。

“What I like about these interventions is that the kids themselves make all the tough choices,” Yeager told me. “They deserve all the credit. We as interveners don’t. And that’s the best way to intervene. Ultimately a person has within themselves some kind of capital, some kind of asset, like knowledge or confidence. And if we can help bring that out, they then carry that asset with them to the next difficulty in life.”

“对于这些干预手段，我尤为欣赏的一点是，所有那些艰难的抉择都是孩子们自己做出的，”耶格尔告诉我。“所有的功劳应该归他们所有，而不属于我们这些干预者。这就是最好的干预方式。说到底，每个人的内在都拥有某种资本，某种资产，比如说知识或信心。如果我们能够帮助他们把这种资产挖掘出来，他们就会凭借这种资产迎接人生的下一个挑战。”

My conversations with the U.L.N. students left me feeling optimistic about their chances. But they also served as a reminder of how easy it is for things to tip the other way — for those early doubts to metastasize into crippling anxieties. What Laude and Yeager are helping to demonstrate is that with the right support, both academic and psychological, these students can actually graduate at high rates from an elite university like the University of Texas. Which is exactly why the giant educational experiment now taking place there has meaning well beyond the Austin campus.

与ULN学生的交谈让我对他们的成功几率持乐观态度。不过，这些交谈也提醒我，事情很容易倒向另一端——那些初期的质疑演变成让人什么事也做不成的焦虑。劳德和耶格尔的工作证明，借助恰当的支持(既包括学术支持，也包括心理支持)，这些学生完全能够以非常高的比率从德州大学这类名校顺利毕业。这正是为什么该校正在进行的大型教育实验的意义远远超出奥斯丁校园。