Essay Assignment #3 Options from Contemporary & Classic Arguments in which you will use the Toulmin Argument (Due 10-24-17)
Option One: Support, refute, or complicate the argument that Garrett Hardin’s analogy in “Lifeboat Ethics” makes an effective argument against traditional liberal approaches to helping the poor.
Option Two: Support, refute, or complicate Harlan Coben’s argument in “The Undercover Parent” that parents are morally compelled to breach their children’s computer privacy for the sake of protecting their children.
Option Three: Addressing Alfred Edmond’s “Why Asking for a Job Applicant’s Facebook Password is Fair Game,” support, refute, or complicate the argument that prospective employees are morally obligated to give up their social media information to potential employers.
Option Four. In the context of Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation,” support, refute, or complicate that humans are morally compelled to eat a vegan diet.
Option Five. In the context of James Q. Wilson’s “Just Take Away Their Guns,” support, refute, or complicate the argument that anti-gun legislation is both ineffective and morally wrong.
Option Six. In the context of Charles Lawrence’s “On Racist Speech,” support, refute, or complicate the assertion that there are conditions that obligate us to censor speech so that there is no such thing as “free speech” as is commonly accepted.
Option Seven. In the context of the essays in Chapter 4, support, defend, or complicate the argument that in the New Economy college is an overrated and overpriced product that should cause many prospective college students to ponder more viable alternatives to building a strong career.
Mapping Components
One. Long-term investment
Two. Long-term income
Three. Less unemployment
Four. Rippling effect on family (first-time college students)
Resources
Community College Transfer and Graduation Rates
Importance of Those First 20 Units in Community College
Time and Cost of Getting a Bachelor's Degree for Community College Students
"Education Isn't the Key to a Good Income" by Rachel Cohen in The Atlantic
Why Are You In College?
Consider the notion of specificity in your college goals.
Micro: Specialize in major to make money
Mid-level Macro: Learn fundamentals to apply to all classes and life challenges
Maximum Macro: Become a critical thinker rather than a mindless consumer
McMahon's Experience with College "Nay-Sayers," which would be my mapping points for essay.
They overreact to a short snapshot in time. For example, they'll cite studies right after Great Recession of 2008.
They fail to see the long-term benefits of education.
They dismiss education with examples of heavy debt, so they fail to complicate the discussion by talking about benefit-cost ratio.
They fail to acknowledge how first-family college graduates create a rippling effect on their family.
They fail to acknowledge late-bloomers who are considered non-college material (as I was).
They cite devastating community college statistics, but don't talk about the importance of the First 20 Units.
Why Students Argue for Not Going to College
One. Treadmill to Nowhere Theory
Two. High cost and debt combined with nightmare stories of unemployment and low-paying jobs
Three. Anxiety due to cultural war that is getting worse
Four. Anxiety due to war between real news and fake news
Counterargument
Anxieties and anecdotes are not solid grounds for dropping out of college.
"America's Most Overrated Product: The Bachelor's Degree" by Marty Nemko
"3 Reasons College Still Matters" by Andrew Delbanco
The American college is going through a period of wrenching change, buffeted by forces – globalization, economic instability, the information technology revolution, the increasingly evident inadequacy of K-12 education, and, perhaps most important, the collapse of consensus about what students should know – that make its task more difficult and contentious than ever before.
For a relatively few students, college remains the sort of place that Anthony Kronman, former dean of Yale Law School, recalls from his days at Williams, where his favorite class took place at the home of a philosophy professor whose two golden retrievers slept on either side of the fireplace “like bookends beside the hearth” while the sunset lit the Berkshire Hills “in scarlet and gold.” For many more students, college means the anxious pursuit of marketable skills in overcrowded, underresourced institutions. For still others, it means traveling by night to a fluorescent office building or to a “virtual classroom” that only exists in cyberspace.
It is a pipe dream to imagine that every student can have the sort of experience that our richest colleges, at their best, provide. But it is a nightmare society that affords the chance to learn and grow only to the wealthy, brilliant, or lucky few. Many remarkable teachers in America’s community colleges, unsung private colleges, and underfunded public colleges live this truth every day, working to keep the ideal of democratic education alive. And so it is my unabashed aim to articulate in my forthcoming book, College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, what a college – any college – should seek to do for its students.
What, then, are today’s prevailing answers to the question, what is college for? The most common answer is an economic one. It’s clear that a college degree long ago supplanted the high school diploma as the minimum qualification for entry into the skilled labor market, and there is abundant evidence that people with a college degree earn more money over the course of their lives than people without one. Some estimates put the worth of a bachelor of arts degree at about a million dollars in incremental lifetime earnings.
For such economic reasons alone, it is alarming that for the first time in history, we face the prospect that the coming generation of Americans will be less educated than its elders.
Within this gloomy general picture are some especially disturbing particulars. For one thing, flat or declining college attainment rates (relative to other nations) apply disproportionately to minorities, who are a growing portion of the American population. And financial means have a shockingly large bearing on educational opportunity, which, according to one authority, looks like this in today’s America: If you are the child of a family making more than $90,000 per year, your odds of getting a BA by age24 are roughly 1 in 2; if your parents make less than $35,000, your odds are 1 in 17.
Moreover, among those who do get to college, high-achieving students from affluent families are four times more likely to attend a selective college than students from poor families with comparable grades and test scores. Since prestigious colleges serve as funnels into leadership positions in business, law, and government, this means that our “best” colleges are doing more to foster than to retard the growth of inequality in our society. Yet colleges are still looked to as engines of social mobility in American life, and it would be shameful if they became, even more than they already are, a system for replicating inherited wealth.
Not surprisingly, as in any discussion of economic matters, one finds dissenters from the predominant view. Some on the right say that pouring more public investment into higher education, in the form of enhanced subsidies for individuals or institutions, is a bad idea. They argue against the goal of universal college education as a fond fantasy and, instead, for a sorting system such as one finds in European countries: vocational training for the low scorers, who will be the semiskilled laborers and functionaries; advanced education for the high scorers, who will be the diplomats and doctors.
Other thinkers, on the left, question whether the aspiration to go to college really makes sense for “low-income students who can least afford to spend money and years” on such a risky venture, given their low graduation rates and high debt. From this point of view, the “education gospel” seems a cruel distraction from “what really provides security to families and children: good jobs at fair wages, robust unions, affordable access to health care and transportation.”
One can be on either side of these questions, or somewhere in the middle, and still believe in the goal of achieving universal college education. Consider an analogy from another sphere of public debate: health care. One sometimes hears that eliminating smoking would save untold billions because of the immense cost of caring for patients who develop lung cancer, emphysema, heart disease, or diabetes. It turns out, however, that reducing the incidence of disease by curtailing smoking may actually end up costing us more, since people who don’t smoke live longer and eventually require expensive therapies for chronic diseases and the inevitable infirmities of old age.
In other words, measuring the benefit as a social cost or gain does not quite get the point – or at least not the whole point. The best reason to end smoking is that people who don’t smoke have a better chance to lead better lives. The best reason to care about college – who goes, and what happens to them when they get there – is not what it does for society in economic terms but what it can do for individuals, in both calculable and incalculable ways.
The second argument for the importance of college is a political one, though one rarely hears it from politicians. This is the argument on behalf of democracy. “The basis of our government,” as Thomas Jefferson put the matter near the end of the 18th century, is “the opinion of the people.” If the new republic was to flourish and endure, it required, above all, an educated citizenry.
This is more true than ever. All of us are bombarded every day with pleadings and persuasions – advertisements, political appeals, punditry of all sorts – designed to capture our loyalty, money, or, more narrowly, our vote. Some say health care reform will bankrupt the country, others that it is an overdue act of justice; some believe that abortion is the work of Satan, others think that to deny a woman the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is a form of abuse. The best chance we have to maintain a functioning democracy is a citizenry that can tell the difference between demagoguery and responsible arguments.
Education for democracy also implies something about what kind of education democratic citizens need. A very good case for college in this sense has been made recently by Kronman, the former Yale dean who now teaches in a Great Books program for Yale undergraduates. In his book Education’s End, Kronman argues for a course of study that introduces students to the constitutive ideas of Western culture, including, among many others, “the ideals of individual freedom and toleration,” “a reliance on markets as a mechanism for the organization of economic life,” and “an acceptance of the truths of modern science.”
Anyone who earns a BA from a reputable college ought to understand something about the genealogy of these ideas and practices, about the historical processes from which they have emerged, the tragic cost when societies fail to defend them, and about alternative ideas both within the Western tradition and outside it. That’s a tall order for anyone to satisfy on his or her own – and one of the marks of an educated person is the recognition that it can never be adequately done and is therefore all the more worth doing.
There is a third case for college, seldom heard, perhaps because it is harder to articulate without sounding platitudinous and vague. I first heard it stated in a plain and passionate way after I had spoken to an alumni group from Columbia, where I teach. The emphasis in my talk was on the Jeffersonian argument – education for citizenship. When I had finished, an elderly alumnus stood up and said more or less the following: “That’s all very nice, professor, but you’ve missed the main point.” With some trepidation, I asked him what that point might be. “Columbia,” he said, “taught me how to enjoy life.”
What he meant was that college had opened his senses as well as his mind to experiences that would otherwise be foreclosed to him. Not only had it enriched his capacity to read demanding works of literature and to grasp fundamental political ideas, it had also heightened and deepened his alertness to color and form, melody and harmony. And now, in the late years of his life, he was grateful. Such an education is a hedge against utilitarian values. It slakes the human craving for contact with works of art that somehow register one’s own longings and yet exceed what one has been able to articulate by and for oneself.
If all that seems too pious, I think of a comparably personal comment I once heard my colleague Judith Shapiro, former provost of Bryn Mawr and then president of Barnard, make to a group of young people about what they should expect from college: “You want the inside of your head to be an interesting place to spend the rest of your life.”
What both Shapiro and the Columbia alum were talking about is sometimes called “liberal education” – a hazardous term today, since it has nothing necessarily to do with liberal politics in the modern sense of the word. The phrase “liberal education” derives from the classical tradition of artes liberales, which was reserved in Greece and Rome – where women were considered inferior and slavery was an accepted feature of civilized society – for “those free men or gentlemen possessed of the requisite leisure for study.” The tradition of liberal learning survived and thrived throughout European history but remained largely the possession of ruling elites. The distinctive American contribution has been the attempt to democratize it, to deploy it on behalf of the cardinal American principle that all persons, regardless of origin, have the right to pursue happiness – and that “getting to know,” in poet and critic Matthew Arnold’s much-quoted phrase, “the best which has been thought and said in the world” is helpful to that pursuit.
This view of what it means to be educated is often caricatured as snobbish and narrow, beholden to the old and wary of the new; but in fact it is neither, as Arnold makes clear by the (seldom quoted) phrase with which he completes his point: “and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits.”
In today’s America, at every kind of institution – from underfunded community colleges to the wealthiest Ivies – this kind of education is at risk. Students are pressured and programmed, trained to live from task to task, relentlessly rehearsed and tested until winners are culled from the rest. Too many colleges do too little to save them from the debilitating frenzy that makes liberal education marginal – if it is offered at all.
In this respect, notwithstanding the bigotries and prejudices of earlier generations, we might not be so quick to say that today’s colleges mark an advance over those of the past.
Consider a once-popular college novel written a hundred years ago, Stover at Yale, in which a young Yalie declares, “I’m going to do the best thing a fellow can do at our age, I’m going to loaf.” The character speaks from the immemorial past, and what he says is likely to sound to us today like a sneering boast from the idle rich. But there is a more dignified sense in which “loaf “ is the colloquial equivalent of contemplation and has always been part of the promise of American life. “I loaf and invite my soul,” says Walt Whitman in that great democratic poem “Song of Myself.”
Surely, every American college ought to defend this waning possibility, whatever we call it. And an American college is only true to itself when it opens its doors to all – the rich, the middle, and the poor – who have the capacity to embrace the precious chance to think and reflect before life engulfs them. If we are serious about democracy, that means everyone.
One. What are the forces behind “wrenching change” of American colleges?
Globalization
Economic instability (according to The Atlantic, 45% of college grads return to live with their parents evidencing a lack of viable job prospects)
Information technology revolution
Inadequacy of K-12 education, especially in lower economic stratums
Collapse of a consensus or agreement of what college students should learn and know; for example, should we “enrich” the mind and soul and if we should what does that mean exactly; or should be the “anxious pursuit of marketable skills in overcrowded, under-resourced institutions”?
(Adding one not mentioned) Exponentially inflating costs of higher education that is especially punitive to those who come from economically modest backgrounds
Two. What does Delbanco mean when he writes about “democratic education”?
He is writing about a type of education that does more than train you for you a job. He’s writing about a type of education that transforms the individual in these ways:
Transforming from a child to an adult by taking on added responsibilities
Becoming a critical thinker who can discern between authenticity and counterfeit and this discernment protects the individual’s self-interests and helps the individual more effectively participate in civic and democratic society. In other words, the person is more than just a mindless consumer.
Is a politician authentic or a fake? What are our standards or criteria for making such a judgment?
Should we live in city X and major in Y? Should we marry Z? Should we marry at all? Should we have children? How many? Ten? Zero? What are our criteria for making such judgments?
College should train us to be able to answer the above questions.
Getting a democratic education also means learning important history so that we can look at current events in context?
Do we know the history of Jim Crow? Why is that important today when we look at mass incarceration?
Do we know the history of the role of slavery in developing the American economy? Why is this important when we look at the debate of having restrictions or not on the capitalistic free market?
Do we know our historical foundation for teaching public education (seen as a trivial exercise for women who were held in low esteem) and the attitudes toward public education today?
Three. What is the relationship between economic class and going to college?
We read that having a college degree will earn you a million more dollars in your lifetime than if you don’t have a college degree.
We further read that the higher up the economic tier you are the greater the chance you will earn a college degree.
We read that, “If you are the child of a family making more than $90,000 per year, your odds of getting a BA by age twenty-four are roughly one in two; if your parents make less than $35,000, your odds are one in seventeen.”
Four. What is the economic debate about funding college to make it accessible to all?
On the Right, some say that we should only fund vocational training for low-performing students who lack economic resources. Some would argue that we need toilet cleaners and hotel workers and other forms of manual labor and that we should not cut off such a pool of manual laborers.
In contrast, those on the Left would argue that America should emulate European models that make college education affordable for all and let the students choose if they want to go into vocational training or not.
Another camp on the Left argues that low-income students should avoid bankrupting themselves by going to college. The benefit possibility is too small compared to the risk factor.
Five. How does Delbanco argue that all people would benefit from a democratic college education in the same sense that all people would benefit from not smoking?
For Delbanco, college improves our intellectual and spiritual health.
Delbanco argues that college helps make us an “informed citizenry” that is capable of participating in government in a responsible and intelligent manner.
Delbanco makes the point that an informed citizenry” must have critical thinking skills to discern between the legitimate political messages from the fake ones.
The author also makes the case that education fosters ideas of individual freedom and economic and scientific literacy.
Delbanco’s final argument is that a college education helps us form a philosophy of life so that we can achieve happiness.
For example, you might in college study Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and learn that pursuing happiness makes us unhappy; pursuing life purpose makes happiness a natural byproduct of a meaningful, purpose-filled life.
It just so happens that I teach Man’s Search for Meaning in my critical thinking class.
Responding to Delbanco with an Argumentative Thesis
A good thesis is a complete sentence that defines your argument.
A good thesis addresses your opponents’ views in a concession clause.
A good thesis often has mapping components or mapping statements that outline your body paragraphs.
A good thesis avoids the obvious and instead struggles to grapple with difficult and complex ideas.
A good thesis embraces complexity and sophistication but is expressed with clarity.
Example of Thesis Statement That Disagrees with Delbanco
While I concede that a college education can enhance the lives of many people as described in Delbanco’s essay, his argument that education must be an affordable right to sustain the intellectual, political and spiritual health of the American citizenry, regardless of their economic status and educational preparedness, is a Cinderella dream that will never come to fruition evidenced by America’s refusal to pay for such an education with their tax dollars, America’s appetite for cheap labor based on a huge pool of non-college educated citizens; the lack of high-paying jobs for the millions upon millions of Americans who will now have worthless college degrees, and the sheer millions of Americans who prefer mindless consumerism to the call of being the type of informed, critical thinking citizens that Delbanco describes.
Essay Outline Based on Above Mapping Components
America’s refusal to pay for such an education with their tax dollars
America’s appetite for cheap labor based on a huge pool of non-college educated citizens
The lack of high-paying jobs for the millions upon millions of Americans who will now have worthless college degrees
The sheer millions of Americans who prefer mindless consumerism to the call of being the type of informed, critical thinking citizens that Delbanco describes. In other words, you can bring the horse to the lake, but you can’t force the horse to drink the water.
Thesis That Defends Delbanco and Disagrees with the Above
The critic who above argues that it is hopeless to make college education accessible to all because we are as a nation a bunch of tight-fisted troglodytes has presented an insidious and morally bankrupt defense of elitism based on apathy to the status quo, learned helplessness, self-serving cynicism, exaggerations, mischaracterizations, and misinformation.
Essay Outline Based on the Above Mapping Components
Apathy to the status quo: The writer is suggesting, erroneously, that we have always refused to pay for education and there’s no reason to think that will change now. How does he substantiate his claim?
Learned helplessness: The writer seems to be saying, “There’s nothing we can do but give up.” How can he back up his claim?
Self-serving cynicism: The writer has a college education and the literacy skills to write an articulate refutation against Delbanco, so perhaps his cynicism is based on a lack of empathy for others who don’t have what he has.
Exaggerations: His explanation of what we’re willing to spend, or not, on education is both over simplistic and exaggerated. Can he substantiate his claim?
Mischaracterizations: He paints many Americans as mindless consumers who wouldn’t benefit from affordable education, but does he address the needs of the working poor, those who work 3 jobs and are barely making it and have no money left over to pursue the type of education that might free them from their cycle of poverty?
Misinformation. He focuses on people whom he calls “mindless consumers,” in other words people who choose to be ignorant, but there are many who desperately hunger for an education and simply cannot afford it in terms of both time and money.
Conclusion
In other words, the Delbanco detractor, you could conclude, is a fraud and a mountebank.
"No, It Doesn't Matter What You Majored In" by Carlo Rotella
Rotella makes the claim that a college graduate of any major has implied skills that make him or her more valuable to a potential employer than a non-graduate.
The graduate can produce a twenty-page essay, has developed the communication and literacy skills to do so.
The graduate has proven to be responsible enough to get a degree.
The graduate has proven to have a modicum of analytical skills, responsibility, and discipline required to get a college degree.
Alina Tugend, "Vocation Or Exploration?"
OUR oldest son is finishing up his junior year in high school, and we’re already overwhelmed by what I’ve been calling the college challenge — trying to figure out what college he can get into and what we can afford.
But there’s also a bigger debate raging that hovers over all our concerns. What exactly is a university education for?
Is it, narrowly, to ensure a good job after graduation? That’s how Rick Scott, the governor of Florida, views it. He has made waves by wanting to shift state financing of public colleges to majors that have the best job prospects. Hello science, technology, engineering and math; goodbye psychology and anthropology.
And Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, has introduced the Student Right to Know Before You Go Act, which would require, among other things, that students have access to data on university graduates’ average annual earnings.
Or is the point of a university degree to give students a broad and deep humanities education that teaches them how to think and write critically? Or can a college education do both?
A little background: Before 1983, receiving a bachelor of arts degree in just about any subject “opened up lots of jobs,” said Anthony P. Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “You could get a B.A. in history and become an accountant. Then the economy underwent a cultural shift.”
Why the early 1980s? It was a combination of the deep recession of 1980-82 and the growth of computer-based technology.
“We started to see a widening distribution of earnings by majors,” said Professor Carnevale, who also served as chairman of the National Commission on Employment Policy under President Bill Clinton.
And that trend has continued. “I was raised to think what you needed was a college degree,” he said. “That’s not the game anymore. It’s what you major in.”
So does that mean I should urge our son to pursue a degree he doesn’t have any interest in because it may provide him with a higher-paying job — or any job, for that matter — after college?
No, Professor Carnevale said, because if you don’t like what you do, you won’t do it well. The point is that “young people now need to have a strategy,” he said. “If you major in art, realize you will have to get a master’s degree. The economic calculus has changed.”
Alex Tabarrok, an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and author of the e-book “Launching the Innovation Renaissance” (TED Books), is not just worried about students finishing four years of college with no jobs, but also that they may never get to the graduation podium at all.
“At least 40 percent of students drop out of four-year universities before graduation, and it’s even higher out of community colleges,” he said. “We have the highest college dropout rate in the industrialized world. Everyone recognizes that something is not quite right.”
Mr. Tabarrok said that we, as a country, needed to look more closely at emulating apprenticeship programs offered in European countries that turn out highly skilled workers.
“We tend to look down on vocational training in the United States, but in Europe, that’s where the majority of the kids go,” he said. “The U.S. mind-set is that there is only one road to an education and to do anything else admits defeat.”
There are two main arguments against pushing more students into vocational training. The first is that it pigeonholes them in careers at a young age.
“We don’t want a system where people are tracked from early on,” said Andrew Delbanco, a professor of humanities at Columbia University and author of the new book “College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be” (Princeton University Press).
The second is that a good liberal arts degree isn’t simply a luxury when economic times are good, but a necessity at all times to create an engaged citizenry, he said.
“The university should be a place for reflection for the young to explore areas of the human experience, to be fully aware of history and the arts,” Professor Delbanco said. “We don’t want to have a population that has technical competence but is not able to think critically about the issues that face us as a society.”
Professor Tabarrok argued, however, that the way the system was set up now, “We’re denying students a hands-on education.” A lot of high school students, he said, “would love to be paid to work alongside adults and learn.”
Do we have to land on one side or another? Not necessarily. To Anne Colby, a consulting professor at Stanford University and author of “Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education” (Jossey-Bass, 2011), the idea that we have to choose between vocational training and the rich, deep learning we associate with liberal arts is a false dichotomy.
She and her colleagues studied undergraduate business programs around the country — which more college students major in than any other field — and discovered that the best programs combined major elements of a liberal arts education and professional training.
One example, she said, is the Pathways program at Santa Clara University in California, in which students in all majors take thematically based sequences of courses that draw together several disciplines. Sustainability, the idea that the current generation can meet its needs without sacrificing future generations’, can be studied, for example, from the point of view of business, history, philosophy and politics. And at Indiana University, the Liberal Arts and Management Program offers interdisciplinary courses like “The History of the Automobile: Economy, Politics and Culture.” This program enables students to learn their specialty in the context of history, literature and other liberal arts.
“Universities need to be more creative in their thinking,” she said. And while internships can help bring a practical piece, faculty members need to oversee what is being learned and connect it back to the rest of the academic learning — something that is not done enough, she said.
José Luis Santos, an assistant professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles, also said it was possible for four-year institutions to offer a solid humanities base along with specialization.
“Colleges and universities eventually respond to market needs all the time,” he said. One example, he said, was how they stepped in to offer Arabic language training when the demand rose for it after Sept. 11.
“That’s a very good example of realigning to meet market needs,” he said. “Colleges and universities eventually respond. It’s just at a slow pace. The critique is that they don’t do it in a timely manner.”
Although much of this is out of an individual student’s control, a student (and his parents) can try to think strategically. That doesn’t mean entering a major you have no interest in, but using all the resources your institution offers to help think about a career before graduation rolls around.
“Some colleges and universities have pretty creative career placement offices that provide events with people in the field,” Professor Colby said. “Take advantage of all the extracurricular activities and speakers. And look for coursework that involves the application of knowledge and real-world themes.”
And be a part of the debate. Things are changing, and that’s not necessarily bad. As Professor Tabarrok said, “Just because something worked in the past doesn’t mean it’s going to work in the new world we have now.”
"College for the Masses" by David Leonhardt
Growing up in Miami in the 1990s, Carlos Escanilla was a lot more interested in hanging out with friends and playing music than in school. The son of immigrants from Chile, he slogged through high school with a C+ average and scored about 900 out of 1,600 on the SAT. “I was convinced I was going to be a famous rock star,” Mr. Escanilla, now 36, said.
When people talk about four-year colleges not being for everyone, the teenage Carlos Escanilla is the sort of student they have in mind. He seemed to be a much better fit for a job, a vocational program or a community college.
Yet on a summer night in 1997, a friend persuaded Mr. Escanilla to try to enroll at nearby Florida International University. The college was growing and might be willing to take a chance on a marginal student. And, Mr. Escanilla began to realize, he didn’t have anything better to do.
“I didn’t have a band, I didn’t have a way to tour,” he says. “I didn’t have any prospects.” Two months later, he was sitting in classes at Florida International.
The fate of students like Mr. Escanilla is crucial to today’s debate over who should go to college: How much money should taxpayers spend subsidizing higher education? How willing should students be to take on college debt? How hard should Washington and state governments push colleges to lift their graduation rates? All of these questions depend on whether a large number of at-risk students are really capable of completing a four-year degree.
As it happens, two separate — and ambitious — recent academic studies have looked at precisely this issue. The economists and education researchers tracked thousands of people over the last two decades in Florida, Georgia and elsewhere who had fallen on either side of hard admissions cutoffs. Less selective colleges often set such benchmarks: Students who score 840 on the SAT, for example, or maintain a C+ average in high school are admitted. Those who don’t clear the bar are generally rejected, and many don’t attend any four-year college.
Such stark cutoffs provide researchers with a kind of natural experiment. Students who score an 830 on the SAT are nearly identical to those who score an 840. Yet if one group goes to college and the other doesn’t, researchers can make meaningful estimates of the true effects of college.
And the two studies have come to remarkably similar conclusions: Enrolling in a four-year college brings large benefits to marginal students.
Roughly half of the students in Georgia who had cleared the bar went on to earn a bachelor’s degree within six years, compared with only 17 percent of those who missed the cutoff, according to one of the studies, by Joshua S. Goodman of Harvard and Michael Hurwitz and Jonathan Smith of the College Board. The benefits were concentrated among lower-income students, both studies found, and among men, one of them found.
Strikingly, the students who initially enrolled in a four-year college were also about as likely to have earned a two-year degree as the other group was. That is, those who started on the more ambitious track were able to downshift, but most of those who started in community colleges struggled to make the leap to four-year colleges. That finding is consistent with other research showing that students do better when they stretch themselves and attend the most selective college that admits them, rather than “undermatching.”
Perhaps most important, the data show that the students just above the admissions cutoff earned substantially more by their late 20s than students just below it — 22 percent more on average, according to the Florida study, which was done by Seth D. Zimmerman, a Princeton economist who will soon move to the University of Chicago. “If you give these students a shot, they’re ready to succeed,” said Mr. Zimmerman, adding that he was surprised by the strength of the findings.
The results, said David H. Autor, an oft-cited labor economist at M.I.T. (who was not an author of either study), are “really important.”
In many ways, the conclusions should not be surprising. Earlier research, albeit based on weaker data sets, had similar findings. More broadly, a long line of research has found that education usually pays off — for individuals and societies — in today’s technologically complex, globalized economy.
YET the new findings also challenge a good bit of conventional wisdom about college. There are few surer ways to elicit murmurs of agreement than to claim that “college isn’t for everyone.” On both the political left and right, experts have taken to arguing that higher education is overrated (at least when it comes to other people’s children). Some liberals seem worried that focusing on education distracts from other important economic issues, like Wall Street, the top 1 percent and the weakness of labor unions.
Many policy makers, for their part, prefer to emphasize an expansion of community college rather than four-year college. President Obama has proposed making community college free for most students, as Tennessee and Chicago have done.
Enrolling more students in community colleges may well make economic sense. So, in all likelihood, would creating more and better vocational training, for well-paid jobs like medical technician and electrician, which don’t require a bachelor’s degree. The United States, Mr. Autor says, “massively underinvests” in such training.
Yet the new research is a reminder that the country also underinvests in enrolling students in four-year colleges — and making sure they graduate. Millions of people with the ability to earn a bachelor’s degree are not doing so, and many would benefit greatly from it.
The unemployment rate among college graduates ages 25 to 34 is just 2 percent, even with the many stories you hear about out-of-work college graduates. They’re not generally working in menial jobs, either. The pay gap between college graduates and everyone else is near a record high. It’s large enough, over a lifetime, to cover many times over the almost $20,000 in student debt that an average graduate has, notes the education researcher Sandy Baum. College graduates are also healthier, happier, more likely to remain married, more likely to be engaged parents and more likely to vote, research has found.
A question that has always hung over these findings is whether college itself deserves any credit for the patterns. You can imagine a scenario in which college graduates would thrive regardless of whether they went to college, because of their own skills and drives. By this same logic, helping more people become college graduates might not necessarily benefit them. But the new findings are the latest, and maybe strongest, reason to believe that college matters. Much as staying in high school is generally a better life strategy than dropping out, continuing on to college seems like the better plan for a great majority of students.
The skills and knowledge that they gain from more time in school are certainly part of the explanation. Mr. Escanilla thinks that, at 15, he was not mature enough to take school seriously. A few years later, he understood that dreaming of rock stardom wasn’t a career plan.
“I fell in love with learning,” he recalls. With his parents suffering financial problems, he worked almost full time while in college (mostly as a barista at Starbucks, which gave him health insurance and a free pound of coffee every week). Finishing college took him almost six years, but he graduated with a degree in liberal arts studies. He chose it over more utilitarian majors because he enjoyed studying subjects like literature and psychology.
After a few years of working as a salesman for Bell South, persuading small businesses to buy high-end telecommunications equipment, he realized he wasn’t thrilled with his work. He had thought about going to graduate school after college but felt intimidated by it, as a first-generation college graduate. By the time he was a married 28-year-old father of two, he was no longer intimidated, and enrolled in a psychology program while working. Today, he is a psychotherapist at a local high school and also counsels adults as a professional coach.
But book learning isn’t anywhere near the full story of Mr. Escanilla’s growing up. His path also highlights another benefit that college can bring: Its graduates have managed to complete adulthood’s first major obstacle course. Doing so helps them learn how to finish other obstacle courses and gives them the confidence that they can, so long as they stay focused. Learning to navigate college fosters a quality that social scientists have taken to calling grit.
“What I learned in college was kind of how to have this, ‘Yes, but how’ attitude,” Mr. Escanilla said. “You fall, dust yourself off and keep going.” He now assigns his high school students to visit the Florida International campus and soak in the atmosphere. “You don’t even need to talk to anybody,” he tells them. “Just walk around. There is something about that energy on campus that makes you want to be better.”
The biggest problem with the colleges that marginal students attend, like Florida International and several state colleges in Georgia, is how many students fall down and don’t figure out a way to keep going. Dropout rates typically hover around 50 percent, which leaves students with the grim combination of debt and no degree. Reducing these rates could bring big economic benefits. Until that happens, some people have been left to wonder whether many teenagers should simply give up on the idea of college.
The answer to that question, however, seems to be a resounding no. Many community colleges have even higher dropout rates than four-year colleges. And most people with no college education are struggling mightily in the 21st-century economy.
Is college for everyone? Surely not. Some students are even less well prepared than Mr. Escanilla and won’t thrive as he did. Others would rather not spend four more years in school and can find rewarding, well-paying work as a medical technician, dental hygienist, police officer, plumber or other jobs that require a two-year degree or vocational training.
Yet the United States is in no danger of turning everyone into four-year college graduates. Only about a third of young adults today receive a bachelor’s degree. The new research confirms that many more teenagers have the ability to do so — and would benefit from it.
“It’s genuinely destructive to give people the message that we’re overinvesting in college, that we’re in a college-debt bubble, that you’ll end up as an unemployed ethnomusicologist with $200,000 in debt working at Starbucks,” Mr. Autor, the M.I.T. economist, said. “That’s not a message you would want to give to anyone you know who has kids.”
The political scientist Robert D. Putnam named his new book on inequality, “Our Kids,” as a lamentation. In past decades, Mr. Putnam argued, the United States made a series of investments that essentially treated children as everyone’s children. The best example was the rise of universal high school in the 20th century, an expensive undertaking that did not directly benefit many taxpayers.
Back then, a high school education was the new ticket to the middle class. Today, a college education is. And when it comes to people’s own children, there is remarkably little disagreement about the value of college, even when it requires taking on debt. Affluent, middle-class and lower-income parents alike, in overwhelming numbers, aspire for their children to finish college.
Americans agree that “our kids” should go to college. The debate is really about who qualifies as “our kids.”
"Vocation or Exploration: Pondering the Purpose of College" by Alina Tugend
One. Why is 1983 a turning point in college education?
Before 1983, any college bachelor’s degree, in any subject, could land you a decent job. Then with recession combined with advances in computer technology, any degree no longer cut it.
Two. What is the crisis of education?
For one, America has the highest college dropout rate in the industrialized world.
For two, there is a huge disconnect between what is learned in college and what is required for hands-on real-world job training.
It appears we need a balance of training students to be critical thinkers and giving them real-life job skills.
"Education's Hungry Hearts" by Mark Edmundson
"America's Most Overrated Product: The Bachelor's Degree" by Marty Nemko
"Should the Obama Generation Drop Out?" by Charles Murray
"The not-rich kid's guide to graduating from college with almost no debt" by Alex T. Williams
Robert Reich Refutes Standard Path of 4-Year College
Topic for an Argumentative Essay: The Costs and Benefits of College
Writing Assignment:
In a 4-page essay that addresses the major points in "College Calculus" and "America: Abandon Your Reverence for the Bachelor's Degree," develop an argumentative thesis that addresses the question if college is worth the cost for your particular area of study. You must have a minimum of 3 sources for your Works Cited page and use MLA format. You may consult the following:
"3 Reasons College Still Matters" by Andrew Delbanco.
"College Is Still Worth It, Despite the Cost"
Factors to Consider
- Your major (computer science different than philosophy)
- The timing of your major (will you graduate when your field is in demand?)
- Your college (some colleges have bigger payoffs than others)
- Your cost and debt, if any
- Average income in your field of work (don't work at a non-profit to pay off a half million dollar loan)
- Amount of time you need to complete college
- Degree of certainty you will like your vocation (cook spends 30 thousand dollars at culinary institute and hates working in a hot kitchen for an angry head chef at a hotel or person hates working in the legal profession)
- Opportunities, if any, you're deferring in your college quest (one of my students dropped out to make $250K annually as a train conductor engineer)
- How low is the work ceiling in your field if you don't have a Bachelor's?
- What are your current opportunities? Are you wealthy and without a degree you can manage your rich father's coffee shop chain and drive a Mercedes? Are you of modest means and find that having a Bachelor's puts you in a better position than where you are now?
- In my experience, evangelists for Not Going to College are tech or business sales freaks who are the exception in the Principle of Success Without College, not the rule. My brother is a real estate flipper, and he has worked 80 hours a week since he got into the business over 20 years ago. He is addicted to high risk, high stakes, and high adrenalin. His "lifestyle" is for about .0001% of the human race.
Developing PEEL Paragraphs (PEEL equals Point, Evidence or Example, Elaboration or Explanation, and Links)
When writing a research paper, it’s very important in the evidence or example section to use a quote from the text.
Paragraph Example (I've underlined the links or transitions)
The essay "Green Guilt" makes a powerful argument that we must accept the afflictions of guilt and sin, whether that guilt is caused by religious or secular forces, in order that we survive and thrive in a cooperative society. As we read in Asma’s essay, “All this internalized self-loathing is the cost we pay for being civilized. In a very well organized society that protects the interests of many, we have to refrain from our natural instincts.” Indeed, our natural instincts, if left unchecked, would create a barbaric world where no kind of viable or even pleasing society could flourish. The second curse of selfish desires unbridled by a sense of guilt and sin would be the moral dissolution that would ensue as hordes of people would become numb to pleasures resulting in frustration and increased violence. We see evidence of such mayhem and grand displays of nihilism in hedonistic societies right before they crumble such as the Fall of Rome. Finally, let us not neglect to point out that a sense of sin can prompt us to be more disciplined so that we maximize the success of our personal goals rather than squandering our life on the foolish errands prompted by our unharnessed desires. To conclude, Asma convincingly shows us that it is in our best interests to repress our base passions by swallowing the Sin Pill in order to fulfill our potential as individuals and as a society.
Sentence Fragments
No subject
Marie Antoinette spent huge sums of money on herself and her favorites. And helped to bring on the French Revolution.
No complete verb
The aluminum boat sitting on its trailer.
Beginning with a subordinating word
We returned to the drugstore. Where we waited for our buddies.
A sentence fragment is part of a sentence that is written as if it were a complete sentence. Reading your draft out loud, backward, sentence by sentence, will help you spot sentence fragments.
Fragment
Going to college is difficult on your time. Not to mention all the money it costs.
Sentence Fragment Exercises
After each sentence, write C for complete or F for fragment sentence. If the sentence is a fragment, correct it so that it is a complete sentence.
One. While hovering over the complexity of a formidable math problem and wondering if he had time to solve the problem before his girlfriend called him to complain about the horrible birthday present he bought her.
Two. In spite of the boyfriend’s growing discontent for his girlfriend, a churlish woman prone to tantrums and grand bouts of petulance.
Three. My BMW 5 series, a serious entry into the luxury car market.
Four. Overcome with nausea from eating ten bowls of angel hair pasta slathered in pine nut garlic pesto.
Five. Winding quickly but safely up the treacherous Palos Verdes hills in the shrouded mist of a lazy June morning, I realized that my BMW gave me feelings of completeness and fulfillment.
Six. To attempt to grasp the profound ignorance of those who deny the compelling truths of science in favor of their pseudo-intellectual ideas about “dangerous” vaccines and the “myths” of global warming.
Seven. The girlfriend whom I lavished with exotic gifts from afar.
Eight. When my cravings for pesto pizza, babaganoush, and triple chocolate cake overcome me during my bouts of acute anxiety.
Nine. Inclined to stop watching sports in the face of my girlfriend’s insistence that I pay more attention to her, I am throwing away my TV.
Ten. At the dance club where I espy my girlfriend flirting with a stranger by the soda machine festooned with party balloons and tinsel.
Eleven. The BMW speeding ahead of me and winding into the misty hills.
Twelve. Before you convert to the religion of veganism in order to impress your vegan girlfriend.
Thirteen. Summoning all my strength to resist the giant chocolate fudge cake sweating on the plate before me.
Avoiding Comma Splices and Run-Ons
Fused (run-on) sentence
Klee's paintings seem simple, they are very sophisticated.
She doubted the value of medication she decided to try it once.
A fused sentence (also called a run-on) joins clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence with no punctuation or words to link them. Fused sentences must be either divided into separate sentences or joined by adding words or punctuation.
Comma Splice
I was strongly attracted to her, she was beautiful and funny.
We hated the meatloaf, the cafeteria served it every Friday.
A comma splice occurs when only a comma separates clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence. To correct a comma splice, you can insert a semicolon or period, connect the clauses with a word such as and or because or restructure the sentence.
After each sentence, put a “C” for Correct or a “CS” for Comma Splice. If the sentence is a comma splice, rewrite it so that it is correct.
One. Bailey used to eat ten pizzas a day, now he eats a spinach salad for lunch and dinner.
Two. Marco no longer runs on the treadmill, instead he opts for the less injury-causing elliptical trainer.
Three. Running can cause shin splints, which can cause excruciating pain.
Four. Running in the incorrect form can wreak havoc on the knees, slowing down can often correct the problem.
Five. While we live in a society where 1,500-calorie cheeseburgers are on the rise, the reading of books, sad to say, is on the decline.
Six. Facebook is a haven for narcissists, it encourages showing off with selfies and other mundane activities that are ways of showing how great and amazing our lives our, what a sham.
Seven. We live in a society where more and more Americans are consuming 1,500-calorie cheeseburgers, however, those same Americans are reading less and less books.
Eight. Love is a virus from outer space, it tends to become most contagious during April and May.
Nine. The tarantula causes horror in many people, moreover there is a species of tarantula in Brazil, the wandering banana spider, that is the most venomous spider in the world.
Ten. Even though spiders cause many people to recoil with horror, most species are harmless.
Eleven. The high repair costs of European luxury vehicles repelled Amanda from buying such a car, instead she opted for a Japanese-made Lexus.
Twelve. Amanda got a job at the Lexus dealership, now she’s trying to get me a job in the same office.
Thirteen. While consuming several cinnamon buns, a twelve-egg cheese omelet, ten slices of French toast slathered in maple syrup, and a tray of Swedish loganberry crepes topped with a dollop of blueberry jam, I contemplated the very grave possibility that I might be eating my way to a heart attack.
Fourteen. Even though I rank marijuana far less dangerous than most pharmaceutical drugs, alcohol, and other commonly used intoxicants, I find marijuana unappealing for a host of reasons, not the least of which is its potential for radically degrading brain cells, its enormous effect on stimulating the appetite, resulting in obesity, and its capacity for over-relaxing many people so that they lose significant motivation to achieve their primary goals, opting instead for a life of sloth and intractable indolence.
According to Andrea A. Lunsford in The St. Martin’s Handbook, Eighth Edition, there are 20 writing errors that merit “The Top 20.”
One. Wrong word: Confusing one word for another.
Here's a list of wrong word usage.
A full-bodied red wine compliments the Pasta Pomodoro.
A compliment is a to say something nice about someone.
Complement is to complete or match well with something.
The BMW salesman excepted my counteroffer of 55K for the sports sedan.
The word should be accepted.
Kryptonite effects Superman in such a way that he loses his powers.
Effect is a noun. Affect is a verb, so it should be the following:
Kryptonite affects Superman in a such a way that he loses his powers.
There superpowers were compromised by the Gamma rays.
We need to use the possessive plural pronoun their.
Two. Missing comma after an introductory phrase or clause
Terrified of slimy foods, Robert hid behind the restaurant’s dumpster.
In spite of my aversion to rollercoasters, I attended the carnival with my family.
Three. Incomplete documentation
Noted dietician and nutritionist Mike Manderlin observes that “Dieting is a mental illness.”
It should read:
Noted dietician and nutritionist Mike Manderlin observes that “Dieting is a mental illness” (277).
Four. Vague Pronoun Reference
Focusing on the pecs during your Monday-Wednesday-Friday workouts is a way of giving you more time to work on your quads and glutes and specializing on the way they’re used in different exercises.
Before Jennifer screamed at Brittany, she came to the conclusion that she was justified in stealing her boyfriend.
Five. Spelling (including homonyms, words that have same spelling but different meanings)
No one came forward to bare witness to the crime.
No one came forward to bear witness to the crime.
Everywhere we went, we saw fast food restaurants.
Everywhere we went, we saw fast food restaurants.
Love is a disease. It’s sickness derives from its power to intoxicate and create capricious, short-term infatuation.
Its sickness derives from its power to intoxicate and create capricious, short-term infatuation.
Six. Mechanical error with a quotation
In his best-selling book, Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure”.
In his best-selling book, Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure.”
In his best-selling book, Love Is a Virus from Outer Space, noted psychologist Michael M. Manderlin asserts that “Falling in love is a form of madness for which there is no cure” (18).
“It forever stuns me that people make life decisions based on something as fickle and capricious as love”, Michael Manderlin writes (22).
“It forever stuns me that people make life decisions based on something as fickle and capricious as love,” Michael Manderlin writes (22).
Seven . Unnecessary comma
I need to workout when at home, and while taking vacations.
You do however use a comma if the comma is between two independent clauses:
I need to workout at home, and when I go on vacation, I bring my yoga mat to hotels.
I need to workout everyday, because I’m addicted to the exercise-induced dopamine.
You do however use a comma after a dependent clause beginning with because:
Because I’m addicted to exercise-induced dopamine, I need to workout everyday.
Peaches, that are green, taste hideous.
The above is an example of an independent clause with an essential information or restrictive information. Not all peaches taste hideous, only green ones. The meaning of the entire sentence needs the dependent clause so there are no commas.
However, if the clause is additional information, the clause is called nonessential or nonrestrictive, and we do use commas:
Peaches, which are on sale at Whole Foods, are my favorite fruit.
Eight. Unnecessary or missing capitalization
Some Traditional Chinese Medicines containing Ephedra remain legal.
We only use capital letters for proper nouns, proper adjectives, first words of sentences, important words in titles, along with certain words indicating directions and family relationships.
Nine. Missing word
The site foreman discriminated women and promoted men with less experience.
The site foreman discriminated against women and promoted men with less experience.
Chris’ behavior becomes bizarre that his family asks for help.
Chris’ behavior becomes so bizarre that his family asks for help.
Ten. Faulty sentence structure
The information which high school athletes are presented with mainly includes information on what credits needed to graduate and thinking about the college which athletes are trying to play for, and apply.
A sentence that starts out with one kind of structure and then changes to another kind can confuse readers. Make sure that each sentence contains a subject and a verb, that subjects and predicates make sense together, and that comparisons have clear meanings. When you join elements (such as subjects or verb phrases) with a coordinating conjunction, make sure that the elements have parallel structures.
The reason I prefer yoga at home to the gym is because I prefer privacy.
I prefer yoga at home to the gym because of privacy.
11. Missing Comma with a Nonrestrictive Element
Marina who was the president of the club was the first to speak.
The clause who was the president of the club does not affect the basic meaning of the sentence: Marina was the first to speak.
A nonrestrictive element gives information not essential to the basic meaning of the sentence. Use commas to set off a nonrestrictive element.
12. Unnecessary Shift in Verb Tense
Priya was watching the great blue heron. Then she slips and falls into the swamp.
Verbs that shift from one tense to another with no clear reason can confuse readers.
13. Missing Comma in a Compound Sentence
Meredith waited for Samir and her sister grew impatient.
Without the comma, a reader may think at first that Meredith waited for both Samir and her sister.
A compound sentence consists of two or more parts that could each stand alone as a sentence. When the parts are joined by a coordinating conjunction, use a comma before the conjunction to indicate a pause between the two thoughts.
14. Unnecessary or Missing Apostrophe (including its/it's)
Overambitious parents can be very harmful to a childs well-being.
The car is lying on it's side in the ditch. Its a white 2004 Passat.
To make a noun possessive, add either an apostrophe and an s (Ed's book) or an apostrophe alone (the boys' gym). Do not use an apostrophe in the possessive pronouns ours, yours, and hers. Use its to mean belong to it; use it's only when you mean it is or it has.
15. Fused (run-on) sentence
Klee's paintings seem simple, they are very sophisticated.
She doubted the value of medication she decided to try it once.
A fused sentence (also called a run-on) joins clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence with no punctuation or words to link them. Fused sentences must be either divided into separate sentences or joined by adding words or punctuation.
16. Comma Splice
I was strongly attracted to her, she was beautiful and funny.
We hated the meatloaf, the cafeteria served it every Friday.
A comma splice occurs when only a comma separates clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence. To correct a comma splice, you can insert a semicolon or period, connect the clauses with a word such as and or because or restructure the sentence.
17. Lack of pronoun/antecedent agreement
Every student must provide their own uniform.
Pronouns must agree with their antecedents in gender (male or female) and in number (singular or plural). Many indefinite pronouns, such as everyone and each, are always singular. When a singular antecedent can refer to a man or woman, either rewrite the sentence to make the antecedent plural or to eliminate the pronoun, or use his or her, he or she and so on. When antecedents are joined by or or nor, the pronoun must agree with the closer antecedent. A collection noun such as team can be either singular or plural, depending on whether the members are seen as a group or individuals.
18. Poorly Integrated Quotation
A 1970s study of what makes food appetizing "Once it became apparent that the steak was actually blue and the fries were green, some people became ill" (Schlosser 565).
Corrected
In a 1970s study about what makes food appetizing, we read, "Once it became apparent that the steak was actually blue and the fries were green, some people became ill" (Schlosser 565).
"Dumpster diving has serious drawbacks as a way of life" (Eighner 383). Finding edible food is especially tricky.
Corrected
"Dumpster diving has serious drawbacks as a way of life," we read in Eighner's book (383). One of the drawbacks is that finding food can be especially difficult.
Quotations should fit smoothly into the surrounding sentence structure. They should be linked clearly to the writing around them (usually with a signal phrase) rather than dropped abruptly into the writing.
19. Missing or Unnecessary Hyphen
This paper looks at fictional and real-life examples.
A compound adjective modifying a noun that follows it requires a hyphen.
The buyers want to fix-up the house and resell it.
A two-word verb should not be hyphenated. A compound adjective that appears before a noun needs a hyphen. However, be careful not to hyphenate two-word verbs or word groups that serve as subject complements.
20. Sentence Fragment
No subject
Marie Antoinette spent huge sums of money on herself and her favorites. And helped to bring on the French Revolution.
No complete verb
The aluminum boat sitting on its trailer.
Beginning with a subordinating word
We returned to the drugstore. Where we waited for our buddies.
A sentence fragment is part of a sentence that is written as if it were a complete sentence. Reading your draft out loud, backward, sentence by sentence, will help you spot sentence fragments.
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