(A) leads to the wrong conclusion. We don’t want the counselors to actively discourage students from being journalists—we just want them to help students have realistic expectations about their careers.

Wrong trigger and wrong conclusion. The premises don’t tell us whether counselors want to maximize their students’ chances of happy lives, so we can’t use this conditional statement. We also aren’t trying to prove that counselors should discourage students from being journalists—just that they should temper the students’ expectations.

(C) hurts the argument by implying that counselors should encourage students to chase glamorous, high-profile journalism jobs.

If career counselors should try to give their students realistic expectations of the jobs they want to pursue, then they should tell students interested in journalism what the job looks like for a normal person. This justifies our conclusion, so (D) is our answer.

Wrong trigger and wrong conclusion. We don’t know if counselors are encouraging students to make decisions they will regret later on, so we can’t use this conditional statement. We also aren’t trying to prove that the counselors are bad at their jobs.