Is College Worth It?

“Are Colleges Worth The Price of Admission?” by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus is an essay that begins by discussing the financial burden that colleges put on college students. It then ask if colleges are providing a valuable education for the ventures taken? What exactly are the families getting? What is benefited from students getting their degree? (Hacker/Dreifus) They then talk about how colleges can give students what they pay for. Finally, they give examples of colleges that they have visited who have successfully provided the most for their students. In the essay “A Lifetime of Student Debt? Not Likely”, Robin Wilson highlights an art show where college graduates are symbolically expressing their resentment for student-loan debt. The authors states that “One college graduate had smashed a ceramic piggy bank, while another had adorned a life-size human statue with nothing but a silver ball and chain. A third drew a picture of a woman in a red coat stumbling down a seemingly endless pathway” (Wilson). The piggy bank meaning students are scraping up every penny to pay for school, the ball and chain meaning they are weighed down by their debt, and the endless pathway meaning that the students feel like they are in a life long commitment.

In order for an author to logically get their point across, they first need to do the most important thing of all: get the reader’s attention! Authors have to have the reader’s attention before they can teach or sell the reader on something. In order for authors to get the attention of their readers, most of them make their essays personal and touch the emotions of the readers, but these authors are using logic.

Throughout her essay, Wilson gathers multiple anecdotes to get the viewpoints from each side of the academic spectrum. She talks about a lawyer who, after acquiring a $100,000 debt, began a Facebook campaign to convince the federal government to lift the burden of repaying student-loan debts (Wilson). She then...