Rhetorical Analysis Of We Send Too Many Students To College By Marty Nemko

In Marty Nemko’s article, “We Send Too Many Students to College,” he analyzes and questions whether college is truly worth the money. Marty “holds a Ph.D. specializing in the evaluation of education from the University of California, Berkeley, and subsequently taught there” (martynemko.com) as well as published five successful books. In addition to his novels, he previously was a columnist at San Francisco Chronical and The Atlantic Monthly, also a contributing editor at several other well-known companies. Nemko’s purpose is to convey the idea that, even though there may be reasons one would attend college, the complications overshadow the benefits. He adopts an impassionate tone in order to convince his adult audience to take a hard look at whether it is worthwhile for their children to attend college. In his article, Nemko first sets the stage with a personal experience of his own as a career counselor. He
He loses his power to appeal to the readers in the end, where his argument becomes a list of too many statistics, slowly losing the readers interest. The audience can see the problem start to develop because he does not draw equally from all three corners of the rhetorical triangle. His shift to logic and reason continues throughout most of the text, which seems to mask all of his other types of appeals to the audience. This makes the reader not take the problem very seriously in the end. Nemko could have more seriously driven home the point that we send too many students off to college by appealing more to the audience’s emotions like he did to suck the readers in to begin with. As well as, strengthening Marty’s ethical appeal, convincing the audience of his credibility or character to build his argument further. The problem arises when the reader gets to the end of the article and is questioning, who is Marty