College Is A Waste Of Time Analysis

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Fallacies are something to be aware of in our daily lives as hidden agendas may be lying around. Fallacies have to do with the reasoning of the argument that makes it misleading or invalid. If you have strong feelings for an argument, it may be hard to avoid fallacies in your writing. In the essay, “College Is a Waste of Time and Money”, Caroline Bird states reasons of why college is a waste of time and money. Although Bird’s essay may seem like a sound argument, fallacies in her essay distort the argument. Throughout the essay, fallacies such as oversimplification, bandwagon, and red herring can be found. Oversimplification is known to be the most common fallacy used. This fallacy is when the writer leaves out information that is important to the argument. Bird is guilty of oversimplification in her essay. …show more content…

Red herring includes an irrelevant topic in the argument that draws away from the main issue. Bird mentions how college students are sad because they feel they are not needed. It’s her “unnerving conclusion” that there is no room in the world for newly turned 18-year-olds, so they are sent away to college to ensure they are out of the way. The question here is, why is college a waste of time and money because of this claim? Her argument is irrelevant as the original argument is the waste of time and money, and not the sadness of the students. She relates sadness to her argument by saying that “(…) we fool ourselves into believing that we are sending them for their own best interests, and that it’s good for them, like eating spinach”. She makes the claim that parents are only sending their children to college because they don’t want to deal with them or because it’s out of their own best interests. Using sadness that is brought on by parents shipping their children off to college is irrelevant; some choose to go all on their own. There just is not a real connection between sadness and the original