I. Think of the best English variant of:

Определить ребенка в ВУЗ, стоимость обучения на платном отделении, аттестат, собирать сумму денег, реестр Фонда поддержки образования, платить взнос, «лопух», абитуриент, сдать экзамены в общем порядке, влепить «двойку», ректор, получить процент, подспорье для вечно нищей высшей школы, агитировать, нищенская зарплата, оплатить в рассрочку, взять на себя обязательство, поторговаться, зачислить автоматом, престижный ВУЗ, выделять деньги, с благими намерениями.

2. Render the above article into English.

2. Is the headline of the article suggestive? How would you translate it into English?

2. Points for discussion.

1. What programme is the article centred around? Is it a worthy innovation?

2. What three innocent questions does the journalist have in mind when speaking about the programme in question?

3. Does the programme seem reliable? Is it appealing?

4. Do the programme`s disadvantages overweigh its advantages?

5. Who profits from the above mentioned programme?

6. Would you use the programme to ensure your child’s enrollment in some top university?

7. Does studying for money differ from studying free of charge?

Delta Blues

It sits just outside the tiny town of Itta Bena in the Delta, in the middle of cotton fields. The campus is spread out and spartan. There are only 2,200 students, their numbers have fallen by 900 since 1977 and one dormitory is boarded up. This is Mississippi Valley State University, popularly known as "Valley". It is all, or almost all, black, and has been so ever since it was founded, in 1950. This blackness is a source of pride in the Delta; but, because of it, Valley's days are probably numbered.

Nearly 100 all-black colleges and universities still exist, almost all of them in the south. Some, like Valley, have seen better days. Others are so popular that increasing numbers of blacks, even those who were once trail-blazers in the desegregation movement, are sending their children to them. They are widely held to teach blacks what white colleges cannot: self-esteem and leadership. Enrollment in them has gone up by 15% since 1986.

By law, however, all such colleges should be integrated if they receive public money. Hence the emotional battle which has been waged for the past few months over Valley. On June 26^th the Supreme Court ordered Mississippi to abolish all remnants of de jure racial segregation within the state’s universities. On October 22^nd the state’s college board announced that Valley would probably close, and be merged with a white college, as part of a general restructuring of the state university system.

Mississippi opened its first whites-only public university in 1848. Four more whites-only universities were opened over the next 77 years. Between 1871 and 1950, the state also began operating three universities to serve blacks. Chronically underfunded, they did not offer the rigorous coursework available at white institutions. They were meant to be second-rate, and were.

The University of Mississippi, the state’s flagship college, admitted its first black student in 1962. The four other white universities followed a few years later. But desegregation did not mean integration. The state’s three “black” universities are 96-99% black; its five white universities are 79-92% white. Mississippi’s population is 35.6% black, the highest percentage of any state in the nation.

Integration was meant to be prodded along by a lawsuit, filed in 1975, which claimed that remnants of the state’s de jure segregation were perpetuating unequal education for blacks. But a district court ruled against the plaintiffs in 1987, declaring that the universities, by lifting their race-based admissions criteria, had adequately dismantled their old practices. The Supreme Court, in June, disagreed with that.

Antonin Scalia, the court’s most conservative member and the sole dissenter, contended that the court’s decision “is as likely to subvert as to promote the interests of those citizens on whose behalf the suit was brought”. To the plaintiffs, it certainly seems that way. They wanted equal admission to white institutions; they now risk losing black institutions in which they have considerable pride.

In its proposals for restructuring the state system, the college board has taken two different tacks. It recommends that less emphasis should be placed on standardised test scores for admission to any university in the system; and blacks have welcomed this, as the annual average scores of blacks are almost always lower than the minimum required for admission to “white” universities. More useful, however (and more positive), was the proposal to upgrade Jackson State University, which is “black”, with new academic programmes, and make it into a comprehensive university. But most Jackson State officials do not want their upgrade to come at the expense of Valley. Blacks, although they deny it, are really asking for the maintenance of separate but “more equal” schools.

They are unlikely to get them. Because Mississippi is so poor, and is also fervently anti-tax, it has been unable in recent years to meet its budget commitment to higher education. A $7.6m reduction in education spending has been proposed for 1994. State officials argue that students of all races would be better served by consolidating the universities and husbanding their resources (the college board estimates that its plan would result in annual savings of $12m). The Supreme Court agrees: its June decision declared that “continuing to maintain all eight universities in Mississippi is wasteful and irrational”.

Jackson and Itta Bena

/The Economist, December12, 1992/

Set Work