short of convincing because he only addresses the negative aspects of educational opportunities and uses hyperbole to render his argument conceivable. Aside from Henry’s crude remarks about higher education, he also claims that depriving more people of education can benefit our country in the long run by restoring “general [educational] standards”(Henry 125). He proposes that the standards of education have dropped with the rise of college students over the years. Henry illustrates his point by maintaining that there is a “sheer decline in the amount of work expected in class…. [because the] influx of mediocrities relentlessly lowers the general standards at colleges to the levels the weak ones can meet”(125). Henry bases his claim on the fact that in the 1940’s, at the all girls Catholic Trinity College in Washington, “A course in Shakespeare meant reading the plays, all 37 of them”(125). He uses that information and compares it to the fact that at a particular “fancy” college, a professor recently told him that in his Shakespeare class students only read four plays and “anything more than one a week... is considered too heavy of a load”(125). Henry’s claim is extremely unconvincing because his method of unfairly comparing and contrasting the evidence only explains the “general standards” at two different schools at different time periods (125). It could be true to a certain extent that standards have decreased with larger class sizes, but Henry does not support his claim correctly because of several fatal reasons. Henry describes the standards at Trinity College in the 1940’s but does not compare it to the standards at Trinity College in the present day. This concludes nothing because comparing two different schools, that can naturally have unique standards, does not show the change in standards over the years. Another flaw in Henry&#...
