seven debate response

After reading all seven of the debates, I found that all of them have errors and aren’t really persuasive but since I have to talk about one, I will talk about “Skip the Admission Game” by Kevin Carey. It really wasn’t persuasive and after reading it, I was confused on what it was trying to persuade. The first half of the article is about if a person is rich, then they should go to an elite school, while the second half of the article talks about how poor people should think of alternatives rather than try to go to an elite school. “If you're among the small handful of students who have stellar SAT scores and parents with several hundred thousand dollars to spend, you should seriously consider going to an elite college or university,” (Par. 1).This is one of the factors that I found unpersuasive because it’s like saying rich people should go to rich school while poor people should stick to poor schools. I feel that it is like trying to persuade people to continue to divide the line between the poor and the rich. Even though the poor may not have enough money, they can find other ways to allow them to go to an elite school. Moreover, Carey said, “If, on the other hand, you're not one of those people -- and the odds are very high that you're not -- your decision-making will be somewhat more complicated,” (Par. 4). It would have been a bit persuasive because not having enough money can be trouble in deciding but to say the odds of something and cutting off the thoughts of it sounded offensive to the poor. It also ignores the fact that there are scholarships that elite schools provide for trouble like money issues. Overall, this is the least persuasive article.

The most persuasive, the one that actually is a little persuading to me is the article “What You Do vs. Where You Go” by Martha(Marty) O’Connell. It is overall better than the rest though it does have factors that make it unpersuasive. Near the middle, she states, “The key to success in college and beyond has more to do with what students do with their time during college than where they choose to attend,”(Par. 4) with a source following it afterward. She cites her source as well as giving a link to it to show us that she isn’t making stuff up. it was somewhat persuasive because earlier in her article, she describes an activity that some people did and gives some examples of famous people who didn’t attend college.