Co150

Rhetorical Analysis

Theodore Johnson

In the newspaper article, “Your So-Called Education” that was written by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa and published on May 14, 2011 by the New York Times it is commencement day and it’s time to see how greatly college really has improved the critical thinking of students. Arum and Roksa claim, undergrad college students aren’t getting the critical thinking skills that they should be getting through their college experience. To back this claim Roksa and Arum said, “If the tests that we used, Collegiate Learning Assessment, were scaled on a traditional 0-to-100 point range, 45 percent of the students would not have demonstrated gains of even one point over the first two years of college, and 36 percent would not have shown such gains over four years of college.” Arum and Roksa place the blame on federal legislation, students, parents, professors,’ administration and even alumni based on the fact that all parties contributed to students being seen as clients and not as a place to further ones education. Arum and Roksa claim that students who reported spending five or fewer hours studying reported an average G.P.A. of 3.16 and go on to insinuate that college students want to be as lazy as possible and still be able to get a degree with minimal work required. Roksa and Arum state, “The funds from Pell Grants and subsidized loans, by being assigned to students to spend on academic institutions they have chosen rather than being packaged as institution grants for colleges to dispense, have empowered the students- for good but also for ill” Roksa and Arum give the solution to this problem by not letting students course evaluations dictate the professors performance since it causes the professors to water down the curriculum to please the students. By taking away the students ability to dictate the outcome of how a University rates its professor the control the students currently have in dictating the amount of hard work that must...