We expect college to be...

a challenging, life-enhancing experience, with sophisticated, useful outcomes resulting from study and earning a degree. Those are the high expectations many in the U.S. hold for college education. This much seems to be agreed. However, at a more specific level, interested parties—students, families, employers, policymakers, educators, and the general public—hold divergent views about the purposes of college. These differences need to be addressed if the U.S. is to reap the potential benefits of expanded access.

Students: In the eyes of many students, whether traditional age or older adults, the college degree is the ticket to a good job. Some focus short-term on their first appointment, and others on the longer-term promise of white-collar employment and at least a middle class lifestyle. In choosing a college—largely by academic reputation³¹—students expect job-related courses that will well prepare them to enter or change to their chosen careers, and then advance within them.

Employers: Employers focus on the specific abilities they need in their employees. They expect colleges to graduate students able to perform consistently well, communicate effectively, think analytically, help solve problems, work collegially in diverse teams, and use relevant skills of the profession.³² Increasingly, they expect technological and information literacy, and the private sector, in particular, looks for strong quantitative reasoning. Inconsistent results lead employers to question higher education's effectiveness and wish that its degrees, like technical certification, ensured documented levels of accomplishment.

Policymakers: Policymakers would like to see colleges and universities produce enough highly skilled graduates to satisfy workforce needs, but also to attract business and industry to local regions. They look for economic growth and improvements in statewide standards of living. As the demand for information- and technology-literate graduates (among others) is left unmet, higher education appears to be disengaged from many of these important societal needs.

The faculty: Ask college faculty members, and most will explain their hope for students to engage intellectually and seriously with what is taught. Deep learning, they believe, develops the ability to defend positions based on knowledge, rather than simply on opinions. Professors expect students to write well and think clearly, explore multiple fields and modes of inquiry, and gain substantive knowledge in a particular field. As they see it, college learning should result in rational and reflective minds, open to continuous learning throughout a lifetime. The higher education community as a whole expects its members, both professors and students, to support free discussion that respects a variety of viewpoints, and to embrace the active life of the mind.

The public: While it recognizes vast differences in prestige among colleges, the general public expects quality and empowering education from them all. Whether graduating from community or liberal arts colleges, or from comprehensive or research universities, students are expected to be better at thinking and at knowledge-based work than after high school. The public anticipates that attendance will pay off in a more successful career, family life, and place in society. And although some important segments of society look for college graduates to assume leadership roles in the community, public attention focuses primarily on "getting in" to college, paying the bills, and then "getting out" with a degree. The public knows comparatively little about what actually happens during the college years.

Thus, while everyone expects college students to learn at high levels, each group tends to have a different view of what that implies. Some see the personal rewards, others the societal benefits. Some stress economic success, others intellectual vitality.

The Greater Expectations National Panel believes that a deepened understanding of the purposes of college for the twenty-first century can bring together these divergent expectations. Through this report and the New Academy it describes, the panel proposes a comprehensive vision of college learning, a vision that acknowledges the multiple purposes of higher learning in a complex society.