Should Everyone Go To College By Owen And Sawhill

Improved Essays
In today’s day and age, almost every young adult is told that attending a four-year university is the next step following high school, but two articles question the idea that college is essential and suggest a different type of post high school education. The first article I analyzed was “Should Everyone Go to College?” by Stephanie Owen and Isabel Sawhill, where the authors discuss several factors about a traditional four-year university and question whether the benefits outweigh the costs. The other article I analyzed was “The New Liberal Arts” by Sanford J. Ungar, in which Unger tries to promote liberal arts colleges and show how they are more beneficial than traditional four-year universities. Both articles, in a way, were essentially trying …show more content…
Logos is the strongest part of the article by Owen and Sawhill. The article primarily is Owen and Sawhill spewing out facts on the price of college and the average income of a college graduate and trying to show that sometimes college is not for everyone. Owen and Sawhill also discuss graduation rates and assert that, “fewer than 60 percent of students who enter four year schools finish within six years and for low income students it’s even worse”, which drives the point home that college is really, fucking hard. (Owen and Sawhill 648). Ungar uses logos, but it just is not as strong as it could be. Ungar mentions the many benefits of attending a liberal-arts college like the “close interaction between faculty members and students and, at it’s best, a sense of community” which sounds nice, but is solely based on opinion (Ungar 662). Despite both articles displaying a pretty even amount of logos, Owen and Sawhill just did a better job of displaying logos simply because their information did not seem biased and was backed up by facts, unlike the information provided by …show more content…
Unlike ethos and logos in “Should Everyone Go to College?”, “The New Liberal Arts” has the best usage of pathos. In “Should Everyone Go to College?”, Owen and Sawhill do little to appeal to their readers’ emotions. The closest Owen and Sawhill get to using pathos is implying that if one does not go to college they may end up as a criminal. Owen and Sawhill’s only other attempt at using pathos is their assertion that college can positively affect one’s life by “affecting things like job satisfaction, health, marriage, parenting, trust, and social interaction” (Owen and Sawhill 640).Ungar, however, uses pathos much better since he is writing from a more student-focused perspective. All college students are worried about the cost of attendance and whether they are going to graduate, and Ungar appeals to these emotions in his article. Pathos was much stronger in “The New Liberal Arts” because Ungar presented a stronger show of emotions by relating to a college student and he attempted to convince students that a liberal arts education will be beneficial and will not ruin ones hopes and dreams for life like a typical college

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