Beat The GMAT

matt7898 · Thu Jan 15, 2009 4:10 pm

I am writing in a week and feel pretty prepared with the exception of the essays.

The following appeared as part of an editorial in a weekly newsmagazine:

"Historically, most of this country's engineers have come from our universities; recently, however, our university-age population has begun to shrink, and decreasing enrollments in our high schools clearly show that this drop in numbers will continue throughout the remainder of the decade. Consequently, our nation will soon be facing a shortage of trained engineers. If we are to remain economically competitive in the world marketplace, then we must increase funding for education-and quickly."

Discuss how well reasoned . . . etc.

The author of this magazine is making the assumptions that the drop in the number of students at the university level will cause a shortage of trained engineers and that increasing funding for education will increase the university population, thus increasing the number of engineers. However, there are four main flaws in the authors reasoning.

Firstly, the argument is lacking evidence that the number students enrolled in engineering programs is actually declining. It is entirely possible that while the overall number of students enrolled at universities and high schools is declining, the number students enrolled in engineering programs is increasing.

Secondly, the author makes the claim that funding for education will increase the number of students enrolled in post secondary education. However, the author gives the reason for the drop in university enrollment to be the fact that there are physically less people in the university age bracket, not that they cannot afford it. Increasing funding for education will not increase the population of university aged children making the authors claim not make sense.

Thirdly, the author provides no statistical evidence that the number of engineers a country has is reflective of that countries competitiveness in the world marketplace. It is possible that fewer skilled engineers could have a much greater effect on the global marketplace than many poorly trained engineers. Therefore, the assumption of connection between the number of engineers and global competiveness is invalid.

Fourthly, the author assumes that increasing funding for education will increase the number of engineers enrolled in university. This is not necessarily the case; the author does not mention specifically what the money should be spent on. There is no indication that the increased spending would increase interest in students pursuing a career in engineering. If, for instance, the author specifically mentioned that the money would be spent creating a pre-engineering program at high schools. The argument that finding would increase enrollment in engineering would make more sense.

In conclusion, the author makes a few assumptions which call into question the validity of the argument. More evidence is required to determine firstly if there will be an engineering shortage and secondly what is the proper way to fix that potential shortage.

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