1 The case for college has been accepted without question for more than a generation. All

high school graduates ought to go, says conventional wisdom and statistical evidence, because college will help them earn more money, become "better" people, and learn to be more responsible citizens than those who don't go.

2 But college has never been able to work its magic for everyone. And now that close to half our high school graduates are attending, those who don't fit the pattern are becoming more numerous, and more obvious. College graduates are selling shoes and driving taxis; college students interfere with each other's experiments and write false letters of recommendation in intense competition for admission to graduate school. Others find no stimulation in their studies, and drop out—often encouraged by college administrators.

3 Some observers say the fault is with the young people themselves—they are spoiled and they are expecting too much. But that's a condemnation of the students as a whole, and doesn't explain all campus unhappiness. Others blame the state of the world, and they are partly right. We've been told that young people have to go to college because our economy can't absorb an army of untrained eighteen-year-olds. But disappointed graduates are learning that it can no longer absorb an army of trained twenty-two-year-olds, either.

4 Some adventuresome educators and watchers have openly begun to suggest that college may not be the best, the proper, the only place for every young person after the completion of high school. We may have been looking at all those surveys and statistics upside down, it seems, and through the rosy glow of our remembered college experiences. Perhaps college doesn't make people intelligent, ambitious, happy, liberal, or quick to learn things—maybe it's just the other way around, and intelligent, ambitious, happy, liberal, quick-learning people are merely ones who have Been attracted to college in the first place. And perhaps all those successful college graduates would have been successful whether they had gone to college or not. This is heresy to those of us who have been brought up to believe that if a little schooling is good, more has to be much better. But contrary evidence is beginning to mount up.

By "fit the pattern" (in Para. 2) the author means that ______.

A．college graduates earn more money

B．college graduates are morally sounder

C．college graduates are more liberal

D．all of the above