Hui 1

Shuliang Hui Professor Hagerty ENGL 1127 22 April 2013 Comparison and Contrast of Two Sources Should college tuitions vary across different disciplines? Some find it is destructive to the higher education system and is unfair to the students with higher tuition rates, but others think setting varied tuition rates would meet societys demand for highly needed work forces. In discussing the topic college tuition rates for different majors, different sources deliver the arguments differently. The most obvious difference could be seen between the popular articles and scholarly articles. Because of different intended audiences, they have to have different styles of making arguments. There is no need to decide which is better than the other since they serve different purposes. However, appreciating the similarities and differences between popular articles and scholarly articles would help us to understand the nature of the issues more in depth and to form our own thoughts in an unbiased way. The Popular article: In defense of equal tuitions for all majors is published on the website of Chronicle of Higher Education as a commentary. It is written in response to the state of Floridas new tuition policy which intends to attract more STEM majored undergraduate students by lowering their tuition rates. Author John Villasnor as a professor at UCLA argues that all majors should have to pay equal amount of tuition in opposite to Floridas new tuition discount policy for STEM majors. He believes that the best way to attract more students to study Engineering is not solely by lowering their tuition. Instead, colleges should convey to young people more effectively why careers in STEM are good choices. The article itself does not offer

Hui 2

detailed evidence nor documented sources and its logical structure is not firm enough to support the argument. But its use of classical appeals has successfully engaged the publics attentions on higher educations policy making. Even though the popular article does not give sufficient and relevant evidences to support most of its claims but the article is well framed by controlling the space given to supporting evidences and the contrary ones. Author Villasnor has devoted most of the space speaking for the hardships and disadvantages of students in liberal arts like but very little mentioned are the reasons and backgrounds of the new tuition policy in Florida. Villasnor claims that college tuitions should be the same for all majors because lowering ones tuition wont attract more students coming and will frustrate students more. However, there are not any grounds on showing how and why lowering tuition rate will not attract more students. The warrant that policies which frustrate students are damaging to the system does not have any backing to show the reasons. So overall this article is weak on logical structures. The scholarly article, Student response to tuition increase by academic majors: empirical grounds for a cost-related tuition policy is published on Higher Education 2008 and it targets readers within the field who will potentially influences policy makings. The study explores the responses of students in different academic majors to tuition increases, with a particular focus on the relationships between tuition increase, and future earnings and college expenditures (Shin and Milton 1). Authors Shin and Milton are both experts on educational studies. They employ formal academic styles with scientific approaches. There are also a handful of documentations and bibliographies to present the arguments suggestively: the article does not make clear arguments but rather gives out advice. Furthermore, it makes less assertive arguments than the popular article does.

Hui 3

The article itself has organized professional formats: it starts with an abstract and then introduction, literature, models and methodology, results and discussions and finally a conclusion. It has covered the issue in many aspects: not only the tuition elasticity according to disciplines but other factors like earning potentials and different instructional costs. At the end, authors have specially noted that this study only applies to schools within U.S context where the market driven policy is favored. The introductions and statements are logically clear and tied one after another. For example, in the introduction part, authors state that we explore student responses to tuition increases broken down by academics majors in order to establish an empirical basis for a costrelated tuition policy (Shin and Milton 2). Author then introduces the cost-related policy In this changing environment, policymakers and academic researchers have been driven to design new college pricing mechanism (Shin and Milton 2). After the introductions, authors address aspects about cost related tuition system like the acquisition of cost data for different levels and how student respond to tuition changes. (Shin and Milton 3) Most of these paragraphs are connected by words like another and therefore which make the transitions among ideas smooth. The authors organized the article well by saying Another approach to identifying the effects of tuition on enrollment involves focusing on the complexity of such effect. Authors also use another, third approach to declare what factors they would consider later in the article like the sentence The third approach in analyzing tuition effects on enrollment is to focus on student enrollment status (Shin and Milton 4). All those worlds make the ideas clear to readers.

Hui 4

The article employs very mild and suggestive tones to present arguments. In the result and explanation of the statistics, the authors do not simply conclude explanations. Instead, they try to further explore the influencing factors and take them into consideration. He also uses words like might be may be and one possible explanation to be objective. For example they say, These descriptive statistics imply that college enrollment has increased despite increases in college tuition Another explanation for these increases in tuition and enrollment may be that tuition has weak or no effects on enrollment, as some studies have reported (Shin and Milton 8). In this way, authors could cover most of the possibilities of the issues. But the scholarly article has its disadvantages because of the length and its lack of the emotions. There are over ten pages of researches and two tables of data so general readers can easily get lost in contents, even though the article is well organized. Another issue that would drive away readers is that this article hardly reaches firm conclusions. It keeps suggesting to reader to take more things into consideration. It is good only if you are equipped with that knowledge, but for most of us we would prefer some propaganda styled article to read on the go. In conclusion, both popular and scholarly articles are similar in that they aim to inform and persuade readers but differ in methods. The popular article is shorter and reader friendly which targets general populations. On the other hand, the scholarly article has been well organized and it approaches the issues over scientific methods. Therefore, readers must be well educated on that topic to understand what the authors professional suggestions are. These two articles would have effective arguments only when they are presented to the right audiences.

Hui 5

Works Cited
Shin, Jung Cheol and Sande Milton. "Student resonse to tuition increase by academic majors: empirical grounds for a cost related tuition policy." Higher Education (2008): 16. Villasenor, John. "Commentary." 7 January 2013. The Chronicle of Higer Education. <http://chronicle.com/article/In-Defense-of-Equal-Tuition/136475/>.