Arugument238,两学校毕业生工作问题

colin8741UID: 2835824

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 resumés and interviewing skills."

From the memo above, a suggestion is drawn from the comparation of the two colleges talked above that Mira Vista College(MVC) should offer more courses in business and computer technology and hire additional job counselors as Green Mountain College(GMC) did to provide more job assistance to graduates. The advice is not convincing due to several fallacies discussed below.

First and foremost, it is not sensible to compare the 90 percent of graduates who had job offers in GMC with the 70 percent of seniors in MVC who found full-time jobs within three moths after graduation. No details about what kind of job offers the graduating seniors got, no comparation can be made between the two. Perhaps lots of the offers were all temporary jobs with low salary and after working temporarily, graduates from GMC have to find another full-time job. We have no idea about the percentage of the graduating seniors who get full-time job offers, maybe less than 70 percent. The memo intend to point out the weakness of MVC in providing job consulting for graduates by citing that only half of graduates in MVC were employed in their major field of study which is not persuasive neither. No statistic is provided about the percentage of the graduates in GMC who was employed in their major field, perhaps less than a half.

Even if the assumption mentioned in the memo that graduates in GMC find their job more quickly is true, conclusion cannot be made that graduates in GMC found better jobs because of the lacked information about the average salaries and the positions in companies. Maybe graduates in MVC find their jobs more cautiously that they chose the ones which can offer acceptable salaries, appropriate positions and a bright future of their career. While the graduates in GMC maybe not as fastidious as those in MVC in job choosing.

In addition, no reason is provided why students in MVC should take more business courses as those in GMC do. Perhaps most students in GMC were majored in financial and economic that may benefit from business courses although we get no information about this hypothesis. Further more, no evidence has been provided that the reason of the low employment rate in MVC, if really, is the lack of computer technology abilities in which way the courses of computer technology are needed. From the memo above, we can see nothing about the benefit of the two courses.

In conclusion, to make his statistics grounded and his suggestion persuasive. The author should provide more comparation between the two colleges in the same premise and more evidence about the benefit of taking financial and technology courses.