Bill Gates White Paper

Purpose Statement: This blog post for my Writing 310 class analyzes the “Postsecondary Success” White Paper, and addresses the things it does right as well as the problems with it.

In class today we read this white paper, which is about some of the major issues that higher education in the United States has, and some of the possible solutions that could be offered. I think this white paper did a good job of explaining some of the problems, such as unaffordability and inaccessibility. Being a student in college currently, I definitely understand what the issues are, since I’m in the process of dealing with them. The paper wasn’t the most well organized, since it only went very in-depth about the issues right at the end of the paper, when it would have served best (in my opinion) to go in-depth about the solutions instead. What I can say is that they did do well with covering the many issues in higher education.

However, while the paper did a good job of identifying the problems, it did a less than stellar job of identifying solutions. There was definitely an attempt to do so, but while the paper said that the Bill Gates foundation was “committed to ensuring that all students have the opportunity to receive a high-quality education,” and said that they would work to fix the problems, they were not very specific as to how. There was a link at the top of the page to some more in depth information about their programs, but the paper itself only really identified the issues, which made it somewhat one-sided. However, the information was at least somewhat there, while not really visible to the casual reader. All things considered, the white paper was good, though it could do with some improvement.