Rhetoric And The BPS Degree

There's a piece in The EvoLLLution that resurfaces the decades-old claim that high school graduates show up to college underprepared to write, and further down the path, employers say they can't find enough entry-level hires who communicate well. The new dimension to the old concern is AI, which students now use to produce polished paragraphs without doing any of the thinking that writing is supposed to refine. Instructors are seeing longer, cleaner discussion posts but students aren't demonstrating better understanding of the content. 

I've been trying for a while now to develop a cogent framework for suggesting that rhetoric can best bridge the gap between fluent output and real understanding. I also think this is the curricular space where Bachelor of Professional Studies (BPS) programs have an advantage over BS and BA degrees. AI can generate sentences instantly, but it can't (at least today) decide which claim is actually worth making, which evidence will move a specific audience, or where an argument is weakest before someone else pokes a hole in it. That's invention and judgment, which are the core of rhetorical training, and the layer of thinking that vanishes when a student lets AI generate a finished draft. A student who's never developed lines of argument, structured proofs, assessed agency, identified rationale or practiced rhetorical criticism, has no way to tell whether the AI's output is going to produce the desired outcome. "It sounds right" is the only test they've got before submitting it for grading.

BPS programs are built around applied, workplace-facing coursework. Case studies, client projects, cross-functional communication, courses shaped around what jobs demand. That structure is a natural home for rhetorical training because it turns rhetoric from an abstract humanities exercise into something students can immediately apply. A BPS student writing a project proposal or a client-facing report has to thoroughly understand the function of the artifact they're producing, who will use the artifact, and how they will use it. The understanding and the related rhetorical skills determine if the student can correctly and ethically direct an AI tool. I think that in the workplace, this skill becomes prompt writing and evaluation expertise. Students who've been trained how and when to ask, "what's my point, who's reading this, where's the weak spot" can push an AI output toward something genuinely useful. They can catch the hollow arguments, redirect the generic responses, and sharpen weak first drafts. 

The ironic thing I keep circling back to is that AI tools look like they're making writing instruction pointless. In fact, they've made the ability to judge writing more important that the writing. For BPS programs trying to turn out graduates who are job-ready, teaching students to think rhetorically AND  write well is another distinguishing feature of their market sensitivity.