Identify Thesis or Main Claim Practice Test
•15 QuestionsRead the following passage and answer the question below.
Universities often advertise themselves as laboratories of free inquiry, but their financial habits tell a different story. When tuition rises faster than wages, institutions explain the increase by pointing to amenities, compliance costs, or the abstract value of a degree. Yet the most consequential change has been administrative expansion: layers of offices tasked with branding, risk management, and metrics that measure learning by proxy. Administration is not inherently wasteful; some of it protects students and improves access. The problem is opacity. Colleges should be required to publish standardized, comprehensible budgets that reveal how tuition dollars are allocated, so that claims about “cost drivers” can be tested rather than merely repeated. Transparency would not automatically lower prices, but it would make public debate about higher education less credulous.
The central claim of the passage is that…
Read the following passage and answer the question below.
Universities often advertise themselves as laboratories of free inquiry, but their financial habits tell a different story. When tuition rises faster than wages, institutions explain the increase by pointing to amenities, compliance costs, or the abstract value of a degree. Yet the most consequential change has been administrative expansion: layers of offices tasked with branding, risk management, and metrics that measure learning by proxy. Administration is not inherently wasteful; some of it protects students and improves access. The problem is opacity. Colleges should be required to publish standardized, comprehensible budgets that reveal how tuition dollars are allocated, so that claims about “cost drivers” can be tested rather than merely repeated. Transparency would not automatically lower prices, but it would make public debate about higher education less credulous.
The central claim of the passage is that…