【推荐2】Allan T. Demaree, a retired executive editor of Fortune magazine, gladly makes donations to Princeton University, his alma matter. His son, who also went to Princeton, points to its endowment of $15.8 billion, and will not give it a penny.

“Why give money to an institution that can seemingly live off its interest when other very deserving entities need money to function tomorrow?” asked the son, Heath Demaree, a professor at Case Western Reserve University who instead donates to Virginia Tech, where he was a graduate student. His question captures how the wealth collected by elite universities like Princeton through soaring endowments over the past decade has widened the divide between a small group of dramaticly wealthy universities and all others.

The result is that America’s already stratified system of higher education is becoming ever more so, and the gap is creating all sorts of tensions as the less wealthy colleges try to compete. Even state universities are going into fund-raising overdrive and trying to increase endowments to catch up.

The wealthiest colleges can tap their endowments to give considerable financial aid to families earning $180,000 or more. They can tempt star professors with high salaries and hard-to-get apartments. They are starting advanced new research laboratories, expanding their campuses and putting up architecturally notable buildings.

Higher education has always been stratified, but the differences were never as large as today. The last decade brought a sea change, as skilled money managers hired by the universities moved their portfolios into high-performing investments, and endowments skyrocketed.

Until recently, top public research universities could rely on enough public subsidy to hold their own, when the taxpayer money was combined with tuition and fund-raising. But that world is changing.

The University of California, Berkeley has a $3 billion endowment, but it is stretched across 34,000 students. And with state budget cuts approaching, Robert Birgeneau, its president, fears he will no longer be able to attract the best professors and students.

“It will cost less for a student from a family with an income of $180,000 to go to Harvard than for a student with a family income of $90,000 to go to Berkeley,” he said, taking into account Harvard’s recent decision to give more financial aid to families earning up to $180,000 annually.

【推荐3】The "cloud war" is taking place as the dispute between the United States and China about data hacking and computer network security grows stronger. Chinese companies such as Alibaba, Baidu and Huawei are expanding within their country and gaining customers in other countries. They are creating data centers in multiple countries and trying to sell data management services throughout the world.

The increasing competition in cloud computing and storage incurs the new challenge and worries some experts. They are concerned about the safety of data. After all, companies often use the cloud to store important, confidential information and to operate such activities as data-driven machinery, telecommunications, banking and transport systems — including plans for driverless vehicles.

Lee Branstetter is an associate professor of economics at the Heinz School of Policy and Management of the Carnegie Mellon University. He told many multi-national companies "have serious concerns about the protection of their intellectual property （知识产权）."Branstetter said some of these large companies already believe they have lost valuable information.

Sheila Jasanoff is the director of the program on science, technology and society at Harvard's Kennedy School. She called the cloud computing industry "unruly". In other words, the industry is not strictly governed.

"People （in the business） are making rules as they go along or taking advantage of the lack of rules," Jasanoff said. She said cloud computing companies are not clear about what security measures they are promising customers. She is worried that a major accident may happen before governments realize the need for stronger rules in the cloud computing industry. She believes there should be internationally-accepted rules to meet the new challenge. But she does not believe an international agreement will be reached anytime soon.