Executive Overview

The United States is fast approaching universal participation in higher education. Recognizing the transformative importance of this development, the Association of American Colleges and Universities launched Greater Expectations: The Commitment to Quality as a Nation Goes to College. As part of that initiative, a national panel of top education, private sector, public policy, and community leaders spent the past two years analyzing higher education in the United States today. The report, Greater Expectations: A New Vision for Learning as a Nation Goes to College, details their findings and recommendations.

The report calls for a dramatic reorganization of undergraduate education to ensure that all college aspirants receive not just access to college, but an education of lasting value. The panel offers a new vision that will promote the kind of learning students need to meet emerging challenges in the workplace, in a diverse democracy, and in an interconnected world. The report also proposes a series of specific actions and collaborations to raise substantially the quality of student learning in college.

The panel concludes that change is urgently needed. Even as college attendance is rising, the performance of too many students is faltering. Public policies have focused on getting students into college, but not on what they are expected to accomplish once there. The result is that the college experience is a revolving door for millions of students, while the college years are poorly spent by many others.

Broad, meaningful reform in higher education is long overdue. The near-universal demand for higher learning in the United States creates new urgency, opportunity, and responsibility to revitalize the practice of undergraduate education.

Some colleges and universities already are making the kinds of learning-centered changes the report recommends. The panel studied pace-setting reforms on campuses across the country, and worked in partnership with a set of competitively selected "Greater Expectations" colleges, community colleges, and universities representing both private and public education.

These campus examples of Greater Expectations in action give reason for hope that Americans can, and will, create a new national commitment to educational excellence for every college student.

College in the Twenty-First Century

College attendance has grown so rapidly over the past four decades that now 75 percent of high school graduates get some postsecondary education within two years of receiving their diplomas. Older adults, also, have enrolled in increasing numbers. A college degree has in many ways become what a high school diploma became 100 years ago—the path to a successful career and to knowledgeable citizenship.

Students are flocking to college because the world is complex, turbulent, and more reliant on knowledge than ever before. But educational practices invented when higher education served only the few are increasingly disconnected from the needs of contemporary students.

Today's college students come from an extraordinarily diverse array of national, racial/ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds. They bring great vitality to campus, but also place significant new demands on faculty knowledge and skill.

Students also attend college today in very different ways. A rapidly rising majority pursues the degree by attending two or more institutions. Part-time enrollment and distance learning are now common. Many students navigate this new terrain without clear direction or educational maps, collecting credits haphazardly as they go.

Preparation for higher learning has not kept pace with access. Less than one-half of students who enter college directly from high school complete even a minimally defined college preparatory program. Only 40 percent of school teachers hold the high expectations for performance that would ready students for college-level work. Once in college, 53 percent of all students must take remedial courses. Those students requiring the most remedial work are the least likely to persist and graduate.

These far-reaching developments call for new approaches to educational quality. But needed reforms are hindered by the absence of broadly shared agreement about what students ought to accomplish in college.

Many students and parents see college primarily as the springboard to employment; they want job-related courses. Policy makers view college as a spur to regional economic growth, and they urge highly targeted workforce development. Business leaders seek graduates who can think analytically, communicate effectively, and solve problems in collaboration with diverse colleagues, clients, or customers. Faculty members want students to develop sophisticated intellectual skills and also to learn about science, society, the arts, and human culture. For the higher education community as a whole, college is a time when faculty and students can explore important issues in ways that respect a variety of viewpoints and deepen understanding.

A meaningful commitment to educational excellence begins with agreement about the most important goals for student learning. The National Panel report offers a contemporary and comprehensive vision for college learning—a vision that addresses the multiple hopes Americans hold for college education. Moreover, this vision engages the role that higher learning plays in creating a just democracy, cooperation among diverse peoples, and a sustainable world.

Barriers to Quality from School to College

The United States can take great pride in the progress it has made in giving more students access to college. But even this work remains both unfinished and insufficient. It is unfinished because access continues to be inequitable, especially for the poor and most minority groups. It is insufficient because many students do not succeed once in college and fail to gain the kind of powerful learning that equips them for a world in flux. Formidable barriers to excellence stand in their way.

Despite years of efforts to improve, secondary education in many school districts continues to be seriously deficient, resulting in students who are underprepared for college-level work. State-mandated tests—the centerpiece of the school reform agenda—often reflect a limited interpretation of learning, overemphasizing memorization of discrete facts at the expense of deeper understanding and its application. Faced with many pressures, including high stakes testing and financial constraints, schools place too little emphasis on the analytical, integrative, and practical skills graduates need.

There is also a disturbing misalignment between high school exit requirements and college entry expectations. Few colleges regularly share with secondary schools what incoming first year students should know and be able to do. "College" courses in high school (as well as remedial courses in college) have proliferated, despite the absence of guiding principles about what characterizes college-level learning. Many colleges and universities have begun to encourage more in-depth, investigative, or research-based learning even in the first year, but high school and many advanced placement courses continue to feature broad surveys and superficial "coverage." The senior year of high school, which ideally should emphasize the intellectual skills expected in college, is wasted for many students.

Once enrolled in college, students face other barriers to excellence.

The fragmentation of the curriculum into a collection of independently "owned" courses is itself an impediment to student accomplishment, because the different courses students take, even on the same campus, are not expected to engage or build on one another. Few maps exist to help students plan or integrate their learning as they move in and out of separately organized courses, programs, and campuses. In the absence of shared learning goals and clear expectations, a college degree more frequently certifies completion of disconnected fragments than of a coherent plan for student accomplishment.

Other barriers to quality include professors trained and rewarded more for research than for teaching, a prestige hierarchy built on reputation and resources rather than on educational success, and a lack of meaningful or comparable measurements to assess student-learning outcomes.

Many college students now juggle multiple demands, including an increased financial burden, full- or part-time employment, and family obligations. College students typically spend less than half the time on their studies that faculty expect. All these conditions complicate efforts to achieve greater expectations for aspiring college graduates—especially if these new realities are not taken into account in a comprehensive reform of undergraduate education.

The Learning Students Need for the Twenty-First Century

These barriers to quality notwithstanding, there is hope on the horizon. College faculties across the country are beginning to adopt new practices that raise the level of student effort and achievement. The Greater Expectations National Panel report and its attendant Web site (www.greaterexpectations.org) highlight many such promising innovations.

The key to successful reform is a clear focus on the kinds of learning that students need for a complex world. The panel urges an invigorated and practical liberal education as the most empowering form of learning for the twenty-first century. It makes strong recommendations about the knowledge and capacities all students should acquire—regardless of backgrounds, fields, or chosen higher education institutions.

The report further recommends that these goals for students' liberal education become the shared concern of both school and college. The transition from high school to college should be considered a joint responsibility of schools and higher education; it should be carefully planned. The learning outcomes needed in this new era can only be achieved when all parts of the educational experience address them.

Students will continue to pursue different specializations in college. But across all fields, the panel calls for higher education to help college students become intentional learners who can adapt to new environments, integrate knowledge from different sources, and continue learning throughout their lives. To thrive in a complex world, these intentional learners should also become:

Empowered through the mastery of intellectual and practical skills

Informed by knowledge about the natural and social worlds and about forms of inquiry basic to these studies

Responsible for their personal actions and for civic values.

The empowered learner. The intellectual and practical skills that students need are extensive, sophisticated, and expanding with the explosion of new technologies. As they progress through grades K-12 and the undergraduate years, and at successively more challenging levels, students should learn to:

effectively communicate orally, visually, in writing, and in a second language
understand and employ quantitative and qualitative analysis to solve problems
interpret and evaluate information from a variety of sources
understand and work within complex systems and with diverse groups
demonstrate intellectual agility and the ability to manage change
transform information into knowledge and knowledge into judgment and action.

The informed learner. While intellectual and practical skills are essential, so is a deeper understanding of the world students inherit, as human beings and as contributing citizens. This knowledge extends beyond core concepts to include ways of investigating human society and the natural world. Both in school and college, students should have sustained opportunities to learn about:

the human imagination, expression, and the products of
many cultures
the interrelations within and among global and cross-cultural communities
means of modeling the natural, social, and technical worlds
the values and histories underlying U.S. democracy.

The responsible learner. The integrity of a democratic society depends on citizens' sense of social responsibility and ethical judgment. To develop these qualities, education should foster:

intellectual honesty
responsibility for society's moral health and for social justice
active participation as a citizen of a diverse democracy
discernment of the ethical consequences of decisions and actions
deep understanding of one's self and respect for the complex identities of others, their histories, and their cultures.

Taken together, these outcomes form the core of a twenty-first century liberal education—liberal not in any political sense, but in terms of liberating and opening the mind, and of preparing students for responsible action. The panel calls for a new national commitment to provide an excellent liberal education to all students, not just those attending elite institutions and not just those studying traditional arts and sciences disciplines. Professional studies—such as business, education, health sciences, technologies—should also be approached as liberal education.

In this spirit, the report urges an end to the traditional, artificial distinctions between liberal and practical education. Liberal education in all fields will have the strongest impact when studies look beyond the classroom to the world's major questions, asking students to apply their developing analytical skills and ethical judgment to significant problems in the world around them. By valuing cooperative as well as individual performance, diversity as a resource for learning, real solutions to unscripted problems, and creativity as well as critical thinking, this newly pragmatic liberal education will both prepare students for a dynamic economy and build civic capacity at home and abroad.

Principles of Good Practice in the New Academy

The Greater Expectations National Panel is optimistic about the future. Liberal education has historically adapted to the needs of a changing world, and innovative approaches can already be found on every kind of campus. The next step is to create from these isolated innovations a comprehensive movement for change across the higher education landscape. The report describes a learning-centered New Academy arising from such a movement.

In this New Academy, colleges and universities will model the purposeful action—the intentionality—they expect of their students. Faculty members will focus more centrally on goals for student learning in both courses and programs, not just on the subject matter taught or the number of credits earned. Leaders will use resources strategically to build a culture centered on learning. Within a broad array of distinctive institutional missions and roles, this learning-centered New Academy will exhibit a rich and desirable diversity of approaches to education. But there will also be a shared commitment to high standards, and new collaborations that create more purposeful educational environments allowing easier passage from one educational institution to another.

Reaching ambitious goals for learning requires integrating elements of the curriculum traditionally treated as separate—general education, the major, and electives—into a coherent program. This does not mean that students will take a common set of courses. But it will require new forms of advising and alignment, both in high school and college, to help each student create a plan of study leading to the essential outcomes of a twenty-first century education. There will be many alternative paths up the educational mountain. But every student needs a sense of direction, markers as well as knowledgeable guides, and navigational tools to support the journey.

Meeting these expectations for quality will focus new attention on the culminating year of college. Both institutions and departments should set standards for achievement of skills, knowledge, and responsibility, and require advanced work that demonstrates the expected outcomes. These culminating performances, which will vary with different fields of study, ought to provide evidence that students can integrate the many parts of their education. They can show how well students actually possess the intellectual, practical, and evaluative judgment and the sense of responsibility a college degree should represent.

Higher education will need to provide both existing and future faculty and school teachers with the necessary preparation to teach effectively in new, challenging environments. The academy must also offer incentives, professional development, support, and rewards for good teaching. Finally, at both the higher and secondary education levels, the nation must develop more sophisticated, nuanced ways of assessing student learning. To build such a culture of evidence, students and faculty need tools to assess all levels of learning and to mark student progress in achieving the goals of a twenty-first century education.

Achieving Greater Expectations: A Shared Responsibility

Achieving this vision will require concerted action among all stakeholders. Learning-centered reform cannot be accomplished by any one institution or even by the higher education sector alone. Collaboration with secondary school leaders will help ensure better preparation of all high school students for rigorous college learning. Collaboration among policy makers at the state and federal levels will focus public policy and resources on the quality of students' liberal education. Cooperation with accrediting agencies will further reinforce the national commitment to connect evidence of student accomplishment with judgments about educational quality.

The report of the Greater Expectations National Panel also presents a preliminary set of recommendations that engages many groups, including those in secondary and higher education, as well as policy makers, business leaders, boards of trustees, school boards, the media, college students, and their parents.

The Greater Expectations National Panel urges all citizens to take part in creating a society where learning is prized and everyone has access to an excellent education. Ultimately, the nation's future and its place in the world depend on a new vision for learning as the nation goes to college.