50 AP English Language and Composition

SECTION 2 Essay Questions

Total time—2 hours and 15 minutes Write your essays on standard 8lA" by 11" composition paper. (At the AP exam, you'll be given a bound booklet containing 12 lined pages)

Essay Question 1 Time—

15 minutes to read the question and sources 40 minutes to write the essay

Instructions: The following essay topic is accompanied by six sources.

Respond to the question below in a well-written, coherent essay that draws on ideas and information found in at least three of the sources. Don't simply summarize or paraphrase the sources. Instead, focus the essay on your point of view, and use the sources to support or bolster your argument.

Topic: Because an educated population enjoys a level of prosperity, culture, and well-being unavailable to those with few educational opportunities, some people argue that all students, regardless of their ability to pay, should go to college—or at least be pushed hard in that direction—after graduating from high school.

Your task: Read the following sources carefully. Then, in an essay that syn­thesizes at least three of the sources, take a position that supports, challenges, or qualifies the claim that all students should attend college.

In your essay, you may refer to the sources simply as Source A, Source B, etc., or by the key words in parentheses below.

Source A (Hansen) Source B (Kurtzman) Source C (Mortality Rates) Source D (Photo with caption) Source E (Toppo and DeBarros) Source F (Rob)

Diagnostic Test 51 SOURCE A

Hansen, Katherine, "What Good is a College Education Anyway?" Quintessential Careers <www.quintcareers.com.> Accessed, August 7, 2006.

The following comes from an article describing the value of a college education.

Research shows that children of college-educated parents are healthier, perform better academically, and are more likely to attend college themselves than children of those with lower educational attainment.

Your education builds a foundation for your children—for our nation's children, and for the children of our global community—which leads to the last point: Education is the cornerstone of public progress.

Education is the essence of the democratic ideals that elevated the United States from a backward land of rebellious colonists to the greatest, most spirited, powerful and successful nation in the world.

And we are the greatest nation. America leads the world in educational attainment, and with one exception, we lead in per-capita income. Speaking at a symposium on American values, Anne L. Heald1 said there is "an extraordinary consensus that the preparation of young people for work is one of the singular most important things a society can do to improve its ability to prosper in a new international economy."

And the relationship between a college education and success will become more and more significant in our information-driven global economy. Higher education will be increasingly important for landing high-paying jobs. Technology and the information age are not the only reasons to be well educated; the trend is toward multiple jobs and even multiple careers, and higher education prepares you to make the transition to new fields.

So what more could you ask of your investment in higher education than prosper­ity, quality of life, the knowledge that bolsters social change, a legacy for your chil­dren, and the means to ensure the continuing success of the American dream?

'Administrator of Center for Learning and Competitiveness, University ofMaryland

52 AP English Language and Composition SOURCE B

Kurtzman, Lori, "Remedial Classes Teach Freshmen What They Already Know," Cincinnati Enquirer, July 30, 2006.

The following passage is an excerpt from a feature story about the problems of remedial college students.

Of the thousands of freshmen entering Ohio colleges and universities this fall, it's a safe bet that more than one-third won't be completely ready for the next level of their education. In the most recent figures available (2003), 41 percent of newly minted Ohio high school graduates who went to Ohio public colleges enrolled in remedial math or reading courses during their freshman year. . . .

. . . So why be concerned over some students playing a little bit of catch-up? Education experts say this isn't just about a student taking a few extra classes. Remediation, which often affects minorities from poor families in low-income pub­lic districts, has an impact that stretches from families to schools to taxpayers.

Remedial needs strain the student, who might pay hundreds or thousands of dol­lars for classes that don't count toward a degree.

. . .They strain colleges, too, which devote instructors, classrooms and supplies to classes that ideally wouldn't be necessary.

And they strain the state—in essence, taxpayers—to the tune of about $30 mil­lion a year in remedial costs. . . .

But perhaps the greatest problem is what so often happens to students who require remediation: They struggle. They fail. They drop out. They lose the earning power of a college degree. The state tracked a group of students for six years and found that among the remedial students, only 15 percent earned a bachelor's degree in that time; nearly three times as many nonremedial students received their degrees. . . .

SOURCE C Diagnostic Test 53

Anonymous, "Higher Education Means Lower Mortality Rates," published online at www.etcs.ipfw.edu, June 28, 2006.

The following is the complete text of a note appended to an article entitled "Is a College Education Worth It?"

When asked to list the benefits of a college education, most people name higher incomes and a rich intellectual life. Now it is clear that better health should be added to the list.

Mortality rates for Americans ages 25 to 64 who have attended college are less than half the rates for those who stopped education after completing high school. In 1999, the most recent year for which final mortality rates have been published, there were 219 deaths per 100,000 people per year for those with 13 or more years of edu­cation, compared with 474 per 100,000 for those with 12 years, and 585 per 100,000 for those with fewer than 12 years of education. These differences are some­what greater for men than for women.

The mortality advantage for Americans with higher education has been growing in recent decades, according to several studies that used census and survey data. And there is an added advantage for educated people in rates of illness and disability, so that those with some college education enjoy extra years of healthy life. Two factors that partly explain the education advantage are lifestyle (educated people are less likely to smoke or engage in other risky behaviors) and health insurance (people with more education tend to have better coverage than those with less education).

54 AP English Language and Composition SOURCE D

The following illustration and its caption come from the blog "Creating Passionate Users" and was submitted as a response to the question, "Does college matter?"

Does college matter?

". . . and then you'll go to college for five years getting an outrageously expensive four-year degree (it'll take decades to pay off your student loans) in a subject which you don't even like but that everyone says is best for your future, learning things that become obsolete in 24 months, and then you'll discover that the so-called "great career opportunities" have been outsourced or automated, or that the world has changed in ways nobody could have predicted and you'll work part-time at Starbucks for the medical plan before you realize that you should have. . . . "

SOURCE E Diagnostic Test 55

Toppo, Gregg, and Anthony DeBarros, "Reality Weighs Down Dreams of College," USA Today, posted online, February 2, 2005.

What follows is part of an article analyzing the trend toward increased college enrollment.

New research reveals a huge gap between aspirations and reality, especially for poor and minority students. For them, high school dropout rates remain high and college graduation rates low.

. . . Recent studies also show that many low-income and minority students who aspire to college are poorly served by their schools and their families, arriving at col­lege unprepared and forcing colleges and universities to spend an estimated $ 1 bil­lion a year on remediation.

"There is a real gap between the aspirations teenagers have and the realities of what happens to them," says Christopher Swanson of the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C. "Teenagers grow up hearing these 'college for all' expectations, and they internalize this. While rhetorically it makes sense, in reality all students are not going to go to college."

". . . We're not being honest with a lot of kids today," says Thomas Toch, author of High Schools on a Human Scale. "We're telling kids that they can do it, when we're not giving them the academic tools to be successful. We're not giving them an edu­cation that will truly prepare them to be successful in college."

A USA Today analysis of two Department of Education surveys shows how quickly aspirations have risen. In 1990, 59% of lOth-graders with educational aspirations expected to get a four-year college degree or higher; by 2002, nearly 80% said the same.

Nudged by economic trends showing manufacturing, farming and other blue-collar jobs disappearing or being shipped overseas, public schools are telling students—even low-income and underperforming students—that they need college degrees.

56 AP English Language and Composition SOURCE F

"Rob," Declining College Standards, "Say Anything," an online blog, posted, January 3, 2006.

In the following passage, a blogger identified as "Rob" makes observations about what it means to go to college.

I can't speak for other places in this country, but my experience in my community during my post high-school days (which weren't just a few years ago) was one where college was "just something you do" after high school. Kids who didn't plan to go to college were considered "lazy" or "unambitious," while those who did go to college usually didn't even know what they wanted to do with their careers. I often wondered if a lot of the kids who decided to hold off on college weren't making the wiser deci­sion. After all, drifting through a couple of years of classes with no real career direc­tion was a good way to waste ten thousand dollars or so.

But not a lot of kids do this, mostly because I think kids go off to college seeking the "college experience" rather than a real education for a specific career. They go off looking for the frat parties, sporting events, campus life and activism, all of which is commonly associated with higher education. What many of them don't understand is that while all that stuff has its place it doesn't exactly translate into a lot of intel­lectual capital for the business market. I don't know how many acquaintances of mine have graduated from college with a "business" or "criminal justice" degree and absolutely no idea how to get a job with it. Most of them end up starting on the bot­tom rung of some company, about where they would have started without a degree, only now with a degree and thousands of dollars of debt.