香港《亚洲时报》1月16日文章，原题：致华裔美国高中生的一封信 “校园蓝调”
（2019年美国联邦调查局调查美国大学招生丑闻的行动——编者注）丑闻爆发时就该结束。好莱坞女演员、对冲基金经理、酒庄老板、房地产开发商和其他各种各样的权势人物，都偷偷摸摸把他们的学渣子女送入精英大学。这个骗局太荒谬了。这个体系早在几十年前就已崩溃，现在该骗局已经国际化。
长期在中国居住的颇有见地的贝特朗讲述了一个常见故事：他的中国富豪朋友决定把家搬到加州，主要是为了让孩子跻身美国精英行列。贝特朗说：“为什么不在中国实现这个目标呢？中国已付出相当大的努力并将继续这样做，以确保财富不会‘玩弄’教育体系。”或许相关措施并不完美。但从长远看，哪个社会更具可持续性且发展得更好：是像美国那样几乎不采取措施避免“精英再现”（与“美国梦”相反）的社会，还是像中国那样尽可能实行贤能政治的社会？
对焦虑的华裔美国高三学生来说，一个历史性“套利”机会已出现。忘掉HYPSM（哈佛、耶鲁、普林斯顿、斯坦福和麻省理工学院的缩写——编者注）吧。它们早在20年前就已沉沦，只是随波逐流者还没意识到。请记住这个缩写TPSFZUN——清华、北大、上海交大、复旦、浙大、中科大和南京大学。瓦茨拉夫·哈维尔（捷克前总统——编者注）曾说，中国崛起如此之快，我们还没来得及感到惊讶。这也适用于高等教育。2004年清华大学在泰晤士高等教育世界大学排名中位列第62，2024年升至第12（北大排第14），在亚洲排名第一。如今，在自然指数年度榜单中排名前10的研究型大学中，中国占据7所。
拖累中国高校排名的一个因素是国际学生不足，这正是你们的优势。别误会，中国名牌大学并非招收任何国际学生，你需要成绩出众。当然，这绝非只是为从中国大学排名和更便宜学费中“套利”。选择这条路，你将获得真正的教育。这条路不适合胆小的人，因为你周围会有一群高考“变种人”，他们的智力闪烁着耀眼光芒。这封信是写给华裔美国人（和散居海外的美国人）的，目的是让他们明白一些道理。有趣的是，成功走这条路的非华裔西方人很多是特立独行者，他们获得的教育远超美国HYPSM所能提供的。（作者Han Feizi，丁玎译）
Open letter to Chinese American high school students
https://asiatimes.com/2024/01/open-letter-to-chinese-american-high-school-students/
Chinese Americans should look beyond the Ivy League farce and consider instead getting a real university education in China
To the place I belong
– John Denver
The jig should have been up when the Varsity Blues scandal broke. Oh was it delicious. Hollywood actresses, hedge fund managers, winery owners, real estate developers and other assorted muckety-mucks sneaking their low-watt spawn into elite colleges. The fraud was so absurd you couldn’t make it up.
Rich people Photoshopping their kids playing sports, paying for medical “stupid” certifications to get “special” proctoring, hiring a Harvard grad SAT ringer able to deliver any score you want. Stanford, Yale, Cornell, Georgetown and we are not going to make USC jokes because the school has gotten a lot better in recent years.
And that Chinese girl who paid US$6.5 million to get into Stanford. Did you see her hour-long “I got into Stanford” video on YouTube? Oh the burns in the comments. If you could only read Chinese. Epic!
Of course, the joke is really on us. Because four years later, elite American universities – with additional malfeasance in the interim – continue to command the same prestige, elicit the same anxiety and demand the same obeisance.
The college counseling business is as hot as ever. Some are reportedly charging over a million dollars for white-glove service starting in the 7th grade, with a perfect record of admissions into HYPSM (if you have to ask, you can’t afford it).
And Asian Americans. Did you really think you scored a win when the Supreme Court scrapped affirmative action last year? The universities saw it coming a mile away and became test-optional well before the gavel came down. Underrepresented applicants are polishing their essays on how they’ve thrived in unsafe spaces while you are stuck with the surname Zhang.
So what can you do? You’ve already maxed out the SATs, signed up for every AP class, play the oboe, do bogus charity work and took up a ridiculous sport like fencing. At this point, it’s just one giant crap shoot.
Will the admissions officer like your essay on teaching inner-city kids at math camp (but they really taught you)? Does Yale need another oboist? Will your history teacher write a flashy enough recommendation?
And even if you do get into HYPSM (or its sorry near peers), you will be surrounded by a sea of people who maxed out on the SATs, took every AP class, play an instrument, did bogus charity work and took up a ridiculous sport like water polo. If it is true that you learn the most from your peers, then HYPSM will likely prove less educational than high school.
If you are lucky and go to a regular high school, at least you are exposed to regular people with regular aspirations and regular opinions – deplorable as they may be. In HYPSM, you will join the tiresome Westoid elite with their anxious entitlement and risible pretensions. It’s a nauseating mélange of sanctimony, condescension, virtue signaling, victim larping and look-at-me posturing.
The only people you might learn something from are the international students who mostly keep to themselves after discovering how loud, deranged and solipsistic their American classmates are.
You will discover that student cliques mostly keep to themselves – international students with international students, blacks with blacks, Asian Americans with Asian Americans, frat boys with frat boys, sorority girls with sorority girls (okay, frat boys and sorority girls do mix).
You will while away four years, slowly socialized into Westoid elitism with its arcane rules of self-censorship and approved aspirations, until your life path is narrowed down to finance, consulting or tech. This is made tolerable by drunken debauchery and meaningless hookups (that’s what the kids tell me anyways) that passes for a social life.
All of this is to deliver an indoctrinated end product to Wall Street and Silicon Valley which has accomplished the miracle of hijacking both progressivism and capitalism while impoverishing the rest of America. Evidently, there are progressive non-solutions to every problem which coincidentally increase FAANG share prices.
