The following appeared in a memo from the director of student housing at Buckingham College To serve the housing needs of our students Buckingham College should build a number of new dormitories Buckingham s enrollment is growing and based on current tren

In this memo, the director of student housing at Buckingham College suggested the school should build more dorms. To support his claim, he or she cited several reasons: the number of students has increased, the rent of off-campus apartments has increased, and more attractive new dorms will attract more students to enroll at Buckingham. Despite these pieces of evidence, the director’s claim still reveals several problems. Therefore, we should find more evidence which may support or undermine this claim to check whether the claim is tenable.
To begin with, the director said the enrollment is growing and will double over the next 50 years based on current trends. However, it might not hold true because we aren’t provided with the data of the number of enrollment in the past 50 years, which is a pivoting data. This is because although sometimes the number of enrollment has been increasing for several years, it still cannot show the long-term trend. If the number of enrollment has increased since 15 or even 30 years ago, it is likely that the increase is not transient. Therefore, the claim will be supported. On the contrary, if the enrollment has increased for only six or seven years, it is likely that the increase is only a temporary trend and the enrollment won’t double over the next 50 years. So, the claim will be undermined.

The director also said that the rent of off-campus apartments has risen so that some students cannot afford it—so more dorms will help these students. To see whether these words are credible, I need more proves on the rent of on-campus dorms to see whether it is more expensive than the rent of off-campus apartments even though the latter has risen. If the rent of on-campus dorms is more expensive than the rent of off-campus ones, it is hard to say that building more dorms will help students who cannot afford the rent. Thus, the director’s recommendation is not credible. On the contrary, if the on-campus dorms are cheaper, then this recommendation will be bolstered.

Additionally, little evidence has been provided to support that more attractive dorms will attract more students to enroll. So, I need something, like high school students’ surveys in the nation or the state where the college stands, to see know they choose the universities. This is because students choose universities due to various factors, such as teaching quality and tuition. If the majority of students say in these surveys that the attraction of the dorms will influence their choices, then more attractive dorms are more likely to attract more students. However, if not, then there is no evidence to show the causal link between the enrollment and the attraction of dorms. Thus, the director’s claim is not reliable.

By and large, although the evidence the director listed seem to be enough to support his or her own claim, we still need more evidence, such as the trend of enrollment in the longer time scale, the rent of on-campus dorms and how students choose their own universities. Only by weighing all the evidence that support the director’s claim as well as some that may undermine his or her claim, can we make decisions on whether building more dorms is a good choice or not.