Informal Writing #5, Jeremy Ilang-Ilang

Jeremy Ilang-Ilang

11am

Informal Writing #5

Both these articles, “Why does college cost so much…” and “There is no college tuition bubble…” make an arguments about the college tuition funding and how expensive or cheap they can be. Although, both these articles try supporting their own standpoints, by one article talking about how the majority of colleges are overpriced and tries persuading the readers to agree about how colleges are ripping off students in many reasons and by the other article stating that although many colleges are expensive, there are still many affordable methods and options to choose from and backs that standpoint of education being affordable. In “Why does college cost so much…”, this author talks about how expensive colleges are and intends these high-cost expenses towards students who are low-class and can’t afford such a cost and however being affordable to rich-class students. For one of his examples, he uses the analogy of the costs of colleges to the expensive Lamborghini and the cheap Hyundai Atos to compare private to public state college prices. Throughout this article you can see that his arguments are obviously showing persuasion into getting people to agree with his standpoint and does so very effectively by the facts and statistics he used, comparisons to cars, asking reflective questions and refers to certain states and colleges for examples of their expenses. In one way he caters to his audience by asking thoughtful questions such as the cost of higher education being “too expensive for whom—and why?” and his frequently used question asking “is college too expensive” as a way of persuading his audience. Much of this context is filled with his rhetorical appeal of using logos and a little bit of pathos, because of the amount of supporting evidence he includes and reasoning of his arguments on the costs of education. On the other hand, the article “There is no college tuition bubble…” also talks about the expensive costs of colleges, but mainly intends to point out that there are many affordable options to choose from if you cannot afford the costly top notch schools. It talks about how we should only be concerned with the affordable options we can choose from and questions why should we even be concerned with the expensive choices. However, this article also states how public colleges try to offset the funding for students based on the financial aid they get from federal government such as Pell grants and student loans. This article unfortunately does not compare to the other in terms of how persuasive or catering it was, because it was much more informative than persuasive and falls short into taking account of ethos, in which it uses more of statistics and supporting evidence, or logos.  Similarly, this author makes a comparison to an expensive car such as a Mercedes saying that “nobody thinks that cars are unaffordable because Mercedes has a model that costs $100,000”, in which just like the other article, states that it depends on the type of people that can afford these kind of cars. I feel that out of these two articles, I am much more resonated with the article that rants about why college costs so much because of how strongly this article connects to its readers by using a lot of supporting evidence and statistics along with the way in which he speaks in his article, using pathological statements. Although since it was a topic I had already agreed on, I felt much more resonated with this article mostly because of the persuasiveness of his writing, compared to the other article which was less persuasive to its readers.