TOW #19 - Article: "Getting In" by Malcolm Gladwell

1. My writing and reading goals for this TOW are to successfully identify rhetorical strategies and devices that the author uses to achieve his purpose. Also, I want to choose a particularly challenging, possibly lengthy, piece of text to construct my TOW from.

The process of college applications and admissions looms over the shoulders of juniors in high school like a dark, stormy, stress-filled cloud. However, Malcolm Gladwell recalls a time when his young, Canadian self applied to college in ten minutes. By simply filling out a sheet, selecting his top three choices, and sending it off, his college admissions process was done. He got into the University of Toronto, his number one choice. Gladwell acknowledges the simplicity of the Ontario educational system.
However, the emphasis of this article is not the author's breezy transition to college, instead the selection process of Ivy-League schools in America. Gladwell states that sociologists have separated the selection process into two types: treatment and selection effects. He gives a real-life example of both to provide his audience with deeper understanding: "The Marine Corps, for instance, is largely a treatment-effect institution. It doesn’t have an enormous admissions office grading applicants along four separate dimensions of toughness and intelligence. It’s confident that the experience of undergoing Marine Corps basic training will turn you into a formidable soldier. A modeling agency, by contrast, is a selection-effect institution. You don’t become beautiful by signing up with an agency. You get signed up by an agency because you’re beautiful." Gladwell gives these examples to ensure that his audience is provided with certain background knowledge that will become essential to his argument later in the essay. By utilizing this information, the author will go on to create an analogy: "At the heart of the American obsession with the Ivy League is the belief that schools like Harvard provide the social and intellectual equivalent of Marine Corps basic training... The extraordinary emphasis the Ivy League places on admissions policies, though, makes it seem more like a modeling agency than like the Marine Corps." Gladwell, through extending his analogy of the admissions process, brings to light the proposal that Ivy League school may be more like a modeling agency in theory. Gladwell is arguing that one gets into an Ivy League school because he is already smart. The fact that one attended such school does not make him smarter than a person that did not attend an Ivy League, Gladwell argues.
Through his effective use of analogy, Gladwell conveys his strong discontent with the Ivy League schools admissions process and makes a call to action to society to create a system where schools provide the best education possible, not extract out high school prodigies.