【kaleidoscope】小组第8次作业 Argument238 by Azoi

azoiUID: 2636348

TOPIC: ARGUMENT238 - The following appeared in a memorandum from the president of Mira Vista College to the college's board of trustees.

"At nearby Green Mountain College, which has more business courses and more job counselors than does Mira Vista College, 90 percent of last year's graduating seniors had job offers from prospective employers. But at Mira Vista College last year, only 70 percent of the seniors who informed the placement office that they would be seeking employment had found full-time jobs within three months after graduation, and only half of these graduates were employed in their major field of study. To help Mira Vista's graduates find employment, we must offer more courses in business and computer technology and hire additional job counselors to help students with their résumés and interviewing skills."
WORDS: 489
TIME: 0:30:00
DATE: 2009/8/13

In the memo, the president of Mira Vista (MV) College is trying to persuade the trustees to agree with the idea of hire more job counselors and schedule more business and computer courses in order to promote the poor employment status quo of its graduates. To back his points, the president even made a comparison between MV College and nearby Green Mountain (GM) College. However, the president fails to provide sufficient evidences to bolster his contention. Moreover, he has also committed many logical fallacies during his reasoning processes, as discussed below.

A threshold problem that undermines the president's contention is that he made a hasty assumption that the quantity of job counselors directly lead to the poor situation of the employment of the college's graduates. As is known to all, the dominant factor of every company recruiting employees is the quality of the graduates. Since the president doesn't give out any report or data on his students’ behavior in the class, it's entirely possible that it is the shoddy education quality compared to the GM College that hampers the employers from hiring its graduates. Or perhaps it is because of the popular subjects provided in GM college meet the market's need for the moment, and its employment rate has surged as a result. Thus it would be totally unwarranted to contribute the low employment rate to the lack of job counselors.

Secondly, the president failed to conduct any detailed research over the efficiency of the job counselors in MV College. It's entirely possible that the counselors are not completing their job carefully. Maybe it is because there's no proper supervision over their work, so the counselors merely give some unpractical and irresponsible suggestions to the students, making no positive efforts in helping them find a favorable job. If such situation exists, the action of adding more job counselors would be doomed end up in vain. In short, it is very improper to recruit more job counselors before the president have a scrutiny over their working performance.

Thirdly, the suggestion made by the president that MV College should open more courses in business and computer lacks solid buttressing. The president doesn’t prove that such courses would be helpful for their students to have a better job. On the contrary, the new courses would be likely toimpose much more burden on the students and as a consequence their grade may be degenerated too. Thus such policy would even have a bad impact over the situation of the graduates' employment. Without comprehensive survey over its students and employers, such policy would be totally put in vain.

In sum, it the president wants to make his points more compelling, he must first carefully check the counselor’s work to see if there’s any space for improvement, and to do more researches both on the employers and the students to decide whether adding more courses and job counselors would be favorable for the college.