Education, Abortion, Immigration, Guns, and Taxes have long been the hot button political issues in American society. They are things that cause blood to roil and create arguments over dinner tables from Maine to Hawaii. People usually have something to say about most of these issues, but not all of them apply to everybody. Only Education effects absolutely everyone. High School students don’t (usually) pay taxes, but they have to go to school, and they have an opinion about their education. States can heavily regulate guns, to certain degree of effect. The rising generation of young people have for the most part decided about how they feel about abortion and immigration. More choices and more freedom they cry. Only education is still divisive. Not whether or not it’s essential (it is) but whether or not higher education is worth the massive price tag. A degree from a four year institution used to be viewed as guaranteeing a better life, a well-paying job, and fun while you’re at it. More and more these days with the “Great Recession” looming large in the rear view mirror, people are questioning whether the thousands and thousands of dollars that they would invest in this system, and the potentially crippling debt are worth it. With jobs even for the “educated” becoming harder and harder to find, as well as salaries that haven’t seen a real increase with the cost of living, one can see why the millennial generation would have questions. It is not however the millennials that Mr. Mark Schneider is speaking to in his essay entitled How Much Is That Bachelor’s Degree Really Worth? The Million Dollar Misunderstanding.  He instead speaks to their (obviously) highly educated parents. He assumes that they will be the ones paying for school, and in many cases he would be right, but there is a large percentage of families out there that simply cannot pay for their child (or children) to go to school. He talks about a formerly infamous misconception that someone who earned their bachelor’s degree would make a million dollars more in their lifetime than someone who had not. He handily disproves this thesis using a great deal of very technical language, combined with some easy to interpret graphs. His most interesting rhetorical technique is the use of an imaginary daughter figure. He portrays the audience as what seems like a middle age man who’s ready for his daughter to move out of the house, and plans on turning her room into a media and recreation center. This small addition takes the otherwise very dry essay out of the dusty academic journal, and into the realm of something that someone would actually read.

Mr. Schneider argues that usually a bachelor’s degree is not worth a million dollars over an earner’s life time. In fact the dollar amount is usually significantly lower. Schneider argues that the cost of the education itself is an offset to this million dollar number, and that on average those with a degree end up making only about 700,000 more over their lifetime.

First off the intrepid reader must discover who exactly Mr. Mark Schneider is trying to reach, and that could take some more detective work than it may at first appear. The author uses such meaty and language as “I use data from the U.S. Department of Education’s 2003 follow up to the 1993 Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B) to generate the starting salaries for the synthetic estimates of work-life earnings” (Schneider 513). So it would seem that his intended audience are quite well educated, or possibly even educators who knew or cared about such studies and statistics. He however goes on to and use a narrative device that seems quite friendly to the casual audience, at least in comparison: “Let’s return to your conversation with your daughter. You show her figure 1 and say, “I told you so! Go to college, and you’re more likely to earn an extra million dollars!” Remember, your daughter is an economist-in-waiting, and she replies, “You forgot to account for opportunity costs associated with getting that degree. And what about discounting these future earnings into a present value?” (Schneider 515) Ok, so perhaps not a hugely friendly narrative example, but it is interesting that the author at least makes an attempt, albeit a feeble one, to sprinkle little oases of layman’s talk into the Saharan desert which is the technical application of economics. Were the reader of this paper to judge it only by these little narrative chunks, the impression of the audience that the author was trying to reach would be that of a group of portly middle age fathers who’s greatest wish in life is to get their daughter out of the house so they could use her room as a media room. This indeed probably seems like safest bet, as the other possible target audience seems like they would be unlikely to read this article, and even less likely to have understood. This audience of course being the third interested party in the Parent, Teacher, Student holy trinity. And indeed it would be logical that an article whose purpose is debunk myths about higher education and it’s economic value would have a target audience of those most deeply impacted by this myth, the soon to be high school graduates who are about enter into that world of higher education, with all of the time and monetary commitment that that entails.  But everything about the way that Schneider writes seems designed to alienate and bore that particular demographic.  In fact some of the verbiage is downright patronizing. Describing the high school age daughter of the recreation room obsessed, hypothetical, dad as a genius economist in waiting seems just a bit unrealistic, and to support more of a parents side of the argument of both the positive and negative aspects of a four year undergraduate degree.

So while the intended audience of this essay never quite comes into clear focus, it is pretty easy to analyze the overall rhetoric and its effectiveness. The essay is indeed quite convincing, for some interesting reasons. While the narrative device certainly adds something to the work, it’s really a mixture of the sheer authority of the article, combined with logical arguments. Unless the essay falls into the hands of a professor of economics, no one who reads it is going to understand all of the words and their implications right off the bat. But since they sound official, and are shrouded in jargon the average reader is going to trust that the author knows what he’s talking about, even if that may not be the case. The parts that the reader does understand, they do make sense. Everyone knows that college is expensive, so that particular argument is an easily swallowed (though still bitter) pill.  These easily accepted arguments combined with the graphs that appear to illustrate the trends which the author describes come together to make a well-rounded, though in places arcane, essay.