GMAT Essays (AWA)

The following appeared as part of an article in the education section of a Waymarsh City newspaper.

“Throughout the last two decades, those who earned graduate degrees found it very difficult to get jobs teaching their academic specialties at the college level. Those with graduate degrees from Waymarsh University had an especially hard time finding such jobs. But better times are coming in the next decade for all academic job seekers, including those from Waymarsh. Demographic trends indicate that an increasing number of people will be reaching college age over the next ten years; consequently, we can expect that the job market will improve dramatically for people seeking college-level teaching positions in their fields.”

The author concludes that graduates from Waymarsh University would be easily recruited for the jobs teaching their academic professions at the college level. To substantiate the conclusion, the author points out the demographic forecasts which show that the next ten years the number of college students will increase, and thus more job offers would be available. This argument, however, fails to be persuasive for the author’s questionable assumptions, statistical error and ultimately illogical causality.

Most conspicuously, the author’s line of reasoning is that the demographic forecasts are accurate, and certainly remain unchanged during the period of ten years. Actually, this assumption is not necessarily valid. Many influential factors can bring about the fluctuated number of population. For example, SARS epidemic disperses globally next two years among major cities. Natural disaster annihilates some regions of the country. Apparently, any of these crises would have impact on the number of population, as well as that of college students. Hence, the period of ten years is still too far to precisely determine the future trends.

Also, the author does not address the validity of the prediction of demographic trends. The given trends may be biased. If the demographic survey is conducted by Waymarsh University’s partisans, or even Waymarsh University itself, then the claim that the number of college age students would increase in the next decade is not cogent. Presumably, Waymarsh University intends to constitute such survey especially to negate the notorious claim that their graduates are mostly unemployed due to low standard, and to attract more students to enroll to the Waymarsh University’s academic program. Obviously, such a result would be unreliable, and cannot longer be used as future prediction.

Finally, this argument is based on the flawed assumption that the number of Waymarsh graduates is now outnumbered that of college students. Consequently, those graduates cannot attain teaching positions in college. However, this is a dubious claim. No evidences does the author use to support this assumption. Possibly, the actual cause of unemployment of Waymarsh graduates is that those graduates are not qualified. The academic program of Waymarsh University may be not standardized, and thus fails to produce qualified graduates. Obviously, the author does not clearly elucidate the root cause of the unemployed graduates issue; therefore, the author’s argument is incomplete.

In summary, this argument is unwarranted. To strengthen the conclusion, the author would have to provide additional evidence that the number of college students would definitely increase in the next ten years. Nothing can change this trend. Moreover, the author has to prove that the forecasts are reliable and not partial. Most importantly, the actual reasons why Waymarsh graduates are difficult to seek college-level instructing jobs should be given. Without such evidences mentioned above, this argument remains logically unconvincing, and fails to impress the readers.