Greater Expectations Initiative

Project Background

AAC&U Calls for a National Dialogue:

With ever larger numbers of students coming to campus, there is an urgent need for both national and local dialogue about how to educate them effectively. The following statement was developed by AAC&U's Board of Directors and revised in consultation with AAC&U members at the 1999 Annual Meeting. We invite you to use it as a point of deparature for candid discussions with faculty members, administrators, trustees, students, alumni, and other core constituents.

Carol Geary Schneider, President

Greater Expectations one page rationale (PDF format).

Consider the following statistics:

• Nearly 80 percent of high school students say they would like to go on to higher education.
• Seventy percent actually do enroll in some form of postsecondary education within two years of graduating from high school.
• The college enrollment of adults aged twenty-five and above has increased to 42 percent of full time matriculants, up from 22 percent two decades ago.
• Through tax policies and scholarship programs, the federal government and many states have made at least two years of postsecondary enrollment almost universally accessible.

Then consider these facts:

• Only 20 to 30 percent of four-year institutions practice selective admissions. Most campuses admit all qualified applicants.
• Public two year colleges, which enroll 37 percent of all college students, must accept in some credit program or non-credit program leading to matriculation, any high school graduate who applies.
• Many institutions, particularly urban ones, enroll large numbers of students for whom English is a second language in which they have not yet achieved sufficient fluency to engage in college level writing.
• Fully one-third of those who attend college take some form of courses considered remedial by their institution.

Then ask yourself these questions:

• What forms of learning does our society need and expect higher education to convey?
• How ready are contemporary students to participate in these kinds of learning when they arrive on campus?
• How ready are colleges and universities to effectively educate this generation of students?

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At the turn of the century when about 4 percent of high school graduates attended college, or in the 1950s when 20 percent or so of high school graduates went on, college was a place for a selected few, mostly from higher socioeconomic groups, who were prepared to pursue a certain kind of education conducted in a manner quite distinct from that of high school.

Now virtually all high school graduates may enroll in college, and the great majority now do. Potentially, this new era of near-universal postsecondary education is an extraordinary opportunity, both for individuals and for society. For individuals, college study opens doors and expands horizons. By developing human talents and understanding, college makes possible not only new career opportunities but richer, fuller lives. For society, the new accessibility of higher education means both a better-prepared work force and a more creative citizenry. Given the challenges we face both in the global economy and in our diverse democracy, Americans should celebrate the prospect of citizens better prepared to deal with difficult issues thoughtfully, knowledgeably, collaboratively, and productively.

We must also recognize, however, that this new era in higher education poses significant new challenges for the academy. We have opened the doors to college without taking full account of what it will actually take to help students reap the potential benefits of college. Increasing numbers of students arrive on campus with nominal preparation and inadequate skills. Many are also unaware that college will expect them to develop sophisticated powers of critical analysis and investigation, to learn both independently and collaboratively, to take increasing responsibility for developing and supporting their own judgments, and to grow perceptibly in their capacity to work with others. With ever larger numbers struggling to combine college study with work and family responsibilities, students face yet another set of complications in making an effective transition to "higher " education.

This generation of students needs, in short, purposeful mentoring and support both to develop a sense of the task at hand and to develop the capacities and commitments necessary to do college work successfully.

Conceptions of faculty work have not adjusted to the challenge of providing higher learning to an entire nation. Although faculty members find their students less skilled and far more in need of mentoring and support than twenty or even ten years ago, they have been left largely on their own to deal with the challenge of fostering high quality learning on a mass scale.

Across the country, there have been increasingly urgent cries for campuses and faculty members to teach more effectively. These have not, in general, been accompanied by modified expectations for research productivity or campus service. Nor have they been reconciled with higher education's rapidly increasing dependence on poorly compensated, part-time, adjunct faculty. American higher education is simultaneously expanding the work expected of college faculty and thinning the ranks of those on hand to do it.

No matter how complete their dedication to teaching, moreover, individual faculty members cannot solve the problems of disparate student readiness on their own. The challenge of setting high standards must be addressed systemically. So too must the challenge of finding effective ways to help all students reach the high levels of knowledge and competence that are now essential to both workplace and civic intelligence.

The United States has already committed itself, de facto, to near-universal postsecondary education. Higher education has embraced these new expectations. Public and private higher education, as well as a whole new generation of for-profit providers, are mobilizing to respond. College will be in the twenty-first century what high school became in the twentieth.

It will become so because most jobs in the workplace and most issues in our national and civic life now require the intellectual skills and awarenesses associated with a college education: capacities of analysis, systemic thinking, sophisticated communication, intellectual collaboration, the ability to work in diverse settings, and problem solving. Creating these capacities in the increasingly large numbers of students of all abilities, ages and backgrounds who come to us is higher education's core obligation to the society that supports us.

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Fundamental Choices

In meeting these obligations, the academy must be careful to avoid some of the mistakes we made as secondary education became a universal experience. Earlier in this century, torn between the principled claims of equality of opportunity on one hand and a deep-seated belief in unequal ability on the other, Americans created a public school system which opened its doors to all, but then resolutely tracked students into highly differentiated experiences of program, instruction, and resources.

Now at the turn of the twenty-first century, we face a comparable set of questions about the effective meaning of a comprehensive commitment to higher education. Will we settle for pockets of excellence available only to some? Or will we organize and invest to help all students experience the full benefits of a conceptually integrated, rigorous and empowering postsecondary education?

If our colleges and universities are to provide an excellent education to all who seek it, we must focus with new seriousness on the full range of valuable outcomes from college-level learning, both for individuals and for a democratic and globally connected society. In doing so, we will need to reach a new level of clarity about the complementary contributions of our schools, community colleges, and baccalaureate institutions in fostering these outcomes.

In consultation with higher education's many constituencies: governmental and community leaders, business and non-profit organizations, students, and parents, we must take the time to ask and answer such questions as:

• What changes in thinking about the place of college in the American educational structure will we need to recognize the full potential of postsecondary learning for both individuals and society?
• What do we need to do, both in schools and in colleges and in the connections between them, to assure quality and to help all students achieve the forms of developed intelligence--individual, preprofessional and civic--that college is intended to foster?
• How do we avoid policy choices and compromises that may propel colleges and universities along that same downward spiral of lowered expectations and demands already traversed by many public schools?

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Mixed Signals in the Public Policy Arena

There are already important efforts underway to address these basic questions about educational quality and student achievement. A few states are coordinating high school competency expectations with college admissions expectations. Others are developing high stakes examinations in the subjects required for college admission which students will have to pass in order to graduate from high school.

In a similar vein, many states have established "K-16 Programs" which provide a forum in which high school and college teachers can develop shared understandings about knowledge and skill expectations for students moving from secondary to collegiate education. The object of these groups is to create a "seamless program" that identifies the kind of education students need at lower levels in order to negotiate the transitions to higher ones.

Not everything going on around higher education is supportive, however, either of classroom quality or of high standards for undergraduate learning. The term "K-16" not only points to the mass higher education phenomenon but also warns colleges and universities of the need to recognize the special demands of collegiate education. College is not, and is not supposed to be, simply an extension of high school.

Many statewide arrangements for externally imposed core curricula and/or transfer of courses between two-year and four-year institutions reduce general education to a structure of unrelated distribution requirements that lack any intellectual rationale and which fail to reflect contemporary understandings about both purpose and practice in effective general education programs. Other states are taking similarly self-defeating actions in relation to assessment. These bureaucratically determined arrangements and interventions are not likely to produce high quality outcomes. Moreover, they often conflict directly with faculty efforts to create well-designed programs that work across all four (or more) years of college learning to broaden students' cultural and intellectual horizons, develop important proficiencies, and prepare them for a world infused with scientific, technological and cultural complexities.

The rise of bureaucratically mandated general education programs is, moreover, simply one aspect of a widely promoted view of college education as the completion of a set number of courses. It is ironic but telling that the original term "a course of study," with its connotations of a purposefully designed program and expectations for achievement has devolved into the widespread view that college-level achievement and completing a requisite number of course credits in designated knowledge areas are one and the same.

The problems presented by allowing course credit to substitute for evidence of cumulative learning are further compounded by the new national fantasy that whole educational programs, with all the complex interconnectedness of their parts, can be "delivered" en mass via pre-packaged electronic courses. Technology is with us to stay, and at its best, offers rich resources for higher order learning. But too often, policy planning for mass delivery of courses ignores everything educators know from research about the importance of faculty mentoring, engaged community and student time-on- task in fostering intellectual development, complex understandings, and creativity.

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Talking to Ourselves

The academy is itself partly to blame for the growing divide between campus and public understandings of higher learning. The academy has been engaged since the mid-1980's in efforts to strengthen its programs and deepen student preparation for a knowledge-intensive society. These efforts have created a wealth of promising innovations that have a demonstrated capacity to help contemporary students, in all their variety, persist and succeed at higher levels of accomplishment. These new educational initiatives include coordinated first-year programs, topically integrated learning communities and other forms of coordinated courses, diverse forms of experiential learning, collaborative research projects on-line and face-to-face, and a variety of other strategies grounded in the powerful concept of learner-centered education. Many of these initiatives make the societal diversity found both on campus and in neighboring communities an important resource for cognitive and interpersonal development.

But the wider community, including those making higher education policy, knows almost nothing about these promising innovations. Overall, the academy has done very little to educate its publics about what to expect of college or to engage discussions about their expectations and sense of the role of higher education. Shared understandings between higher education and its publics about what should happen in college are limited. Thus, as one analyst puts it, the public's support for higher education is a mile wide but only an inch deep. The credentials bestowed by colleges and universities continue to be sought, but too often in ways that defeat their ultimate value.

Academia has long described its highest quality education as liberal education, preparation for a life as well as a living; education for civic engagement as well as workplace intelligence. Contemporary high quality programs develop students' analytical and creative capacities, expand their cultural and ethical horizons, and foster in graduates the inclination and the abilities to grapple with the complexity of new developments and unstructured problems. Yet recruitment and public relations materials too often stress only the work-related advantages of higher education, ignoring the humanistic, scientific, ethical, and societal purposes of college learning.

If, in our policies, public statements, and daily educational practices we send a confused and incomplete message about the distinctive educational purposes of a baccalaureate education, we should not be surprised if our various publics do not understand us. We, in collaboration with school, business, and community leaders, urgently need to formulate clear and comprehensible statements about the distinctive purposes and characteristics of college learning. College educators need to relate their practices quite intentionally and transparently to these ends. We need to be clear about what is expected and why, convey those goals and the reasons for them to students, and prepare them to meet the expectations. We need to document both the resources needed to do our work and the high price of attempting to educate students without the needed resources.

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Opening the Conversation

Where should these conversations about greater expectations for college learning begin? Here are some questions to frame the discussion:

• What do we mean by effective "readiness for college"? How can school and college educators reach cooperative understandings about practices and assessments that foster such readiness?
• How do we prepare students to benefit fully from the opportunities of a higher education? How do we respond when matriculants are not so prepared?
• How do we support students in making the transition to inquiry-based higher education at its best?
• How can we help students to make a coherent whole of their disparate educational experiences recognizing that students are studying part-time, are employed for substantial amounts of time even while carrying a full schedule of courses, or spread their education out over many years, at multiple institutions, and through a variety of instructional media?
• What is the significance of a diverse educational community itself in fostering high quality outcomes, including preparation for a diverse democracy and a global economy?
• How can colleges and universities provide the support of a mentoring community to all students, of every background and preparation, comprehensively and inclusively?
• How do we use new technologies in ways that support the development of students' reflective, analytic and cooperative capacities?
• What aspects of school and college learning now do or can be made to build civic capacity to renew a pluralistic democracy with global responsibilities?
• How can we be more intentional about developing habits that enable students to pursue new learning beyond college and throughout their lives?

In answering these questions many of us, particularly the more senior members of the academic community, will have to surrender the notion that the college teaching and learning environment of our (somewhat rose-colored) undergraduate memories bears much resemblance to the current or future world of baccalaureate education. But the obligation to educate each student deeply and broadly has not changed, and must not change if we are to serve society fully.

Speaking on behalf of the members of the Association, we call on educators to work with their many constituencies, both internal and external, to restate the purposes of higher learning clearly and fully and to support those purposes with carefully matched practices.

We need to answer the questions we have posed with new clarity about what is expected, new conceptual and pedagogical capacity to support those expectations, and a new commitment to create real and meaningful connections between what is learned in college and the needs of the wider world. The answers will surely create greater expectations for our students even as, in formulating them, we create greater expectations for ourselves.

Association of American Colleges and Universities