, “I saw what different paths my friendswent on, and I decided that I didn’t want to not go back to schoolat all.”

Mariella, for example, noted,“I didn’t have the best grades in high school, so I didn’t apply toany four- year colleges. I just thought it was a waste of time, sinceI knew that I wasn’t going anywhere real good. So that’s why I’mhere.”

Recent high school graduates, who represent the majority offirst- time community college students, tended to report that theyhad always assumed that college would be the immediate stepafter they finished high school.

well over two-thirds of first-time commu-nity college students enter with the express goal of attaining aneducational credential

students may be pursuing one of many possible goals, includ-ing transfer to a baccalaureate-granting college, certifi ca tion orlicensure in an occupation, exploration of possible career paths,avocational interests, or job- spe cific professional development.

the funda-mental character of the community college derives from the ideathat its doors are open to everyone.

Or as another student put it, “This islike high school with cigarettes.”

community colleges are heavilyin flu enced by the local and state contexts, and as a result thevariation extends across colleges as well.

one of the truisms aboutthe two- year sector is that its diversity when it comes to educa-tional missions, program offerings, and student population cre-ates a bewildering and contradictory set of policies and practiceswithin each college.

American higher education is due for reinvention, if it is to ad-dress the realities that apply to today’s students

my aim is toilluminate how college students understand their educationalpaths, what mismatches exist between their expectations andtheir professors’ expectations, and how some of the traditionalstructures and norms of higher education function as obstaclesto increased access and educational opportunity.

Thefirst of the three parts begins with an examination of students’goals, expectations, and orientation toward college.

we must uncoverstudents’ preconceptions and expectations and integrate thoseresults as we rethink course objectives and the means of accom-plishing them.

chang-ing from within requires a more comprehensive understandingof today’s college students and how to address their needs.

I contendthat accommodating the changing patterns of partici pa tion inhigher education will require orga ni za tional changes, and thatthese will benefit all college students at every level

multiple and conflicting expectations—among stu-dents and instructors—can easily lead to miscommunication inthe classroom and undermine the learning environment.

such knowledge requires awell- grounded understanding of students’ perspectives, expecta-tions, and behavior.

excellentteachers tend to assume that their students can learn at a highlevel, and that such teachers understand enough about how peo-ple learn to be able to support in-depth learning.

The other common approach is to tryto make the work easier, whether by slowing down, by break-ing the subject matter into discrete parts, or by assigning less.This strategy, however, risks focusing on low-level cognitive ob-jectives to the exclusion of higher-order thinking skills.

professors who view their stu-dents as underprepared for college tend to respond in one of twoways. One approach is to “maintain standards,” by continuingalong as usual

If a stu-dent’s style of partic i pa tion is different from the norm, for ex-ample, an instructor may believe that the student is not ascapable as the other students.

Sometimes the assumptions about appropriate socialbehavior and academic performance are class- or race- based,embodying norms and values that are not universally held oreven acknowledged.

Even in college classes, with students who have metentry- level requirements, professors lament students’ weak skillsand lack of preparation for the demands of college.

Professors were asking the class to analyze texts, butsome students were unprepared to do so, for their high schoolwork had familiarized them with summarizing and paraphras-ing, but nothing more.

I draw on interviews with more

than 120 students, conducted as part of four different researchproj ects

Being unprepared to meet certain expectations, however, is notthe same as being unable to meet them.

rooms in the 1970s, as working-class students resisted the ab-stract exercises that their professors devised.

Howard London, forinstance, observed the conflict inside community college class-

The most compelling evidence of this disjuncture emerges at theclassroom leve

The complications are perhapsmost evident at community colleges, where the diversity of stu-dents is most pronounced

Higher education’s exclusive beginnings have kept col-leges from adequately serving a greater proportion of thepopulation

My children are old enough so I can say, ‘It’s time forMom to do something she would really like.’

“A lot of people who come to thecommunity college—not half, but a lot of them—are here be-cause they don’t have the grades to get into a good college, andthe other people are here because they don’t have the money toget into a good college.

“I’ll be going here for a year and then trans-ferring to [the nearby university]. I thought it would be nice tosave a little money before I head off.”

“Really it was just finan cial. I got into severalout- of- state universities coming out of high school, but I couldn’tafford any of them. Even with academic scholarships they werestill too much money, because I have to pay for half of my owncollege

“I wanted an education,but I wasn’t ready to put forth the horsepower; I wasn’t ready toget serious about it.

In particular, he said, “I saw friends working at the pizzaplace—and I didn’t want to do that.”

“My friends had the ability to go straight into universitywithout worrying about paying. I didn’t. I lived on my own inhigh school, and so as soon as I graduated I needed to producemoney because I didn’t have any.”

For women who had left high school and started familiesyears earlier, attending college had not been part of the plan.

The three chapters take up themes that consistentlyemerged from those interviews, and provide the basis for under-standing the tensions and misunderstandings that occur insidecollege classrooms.

The explanation for the disparities lies in the fundamentalcontradiction between the elite origins of American higher edu-cation and current increased access for people previously ex-cluded.

How is it that the percentage of the popu-lation with college degrees has stayed the same over the past fourde cades

By contrast, other countries have increased their collegegraduation rates—in the case of Japan and Korea, by over 30

the number of college graduates has merely kept pace with theoverall population growth.

The Ameri-can system of providing higher education for the masses remainsan unfinished proj ect

it comprises the largest group ofdifferent types of accredited postsecondary institutions and con-stitutes the first stop for roughly half of today’s college students.In many states (thirty-five out of fifty

From this perspective, The College Fear Factor takes an un-conventional approach, focusing on the least selective and leastprestigious colleges in the country: community colleges

In a recent real-ity show, the preeminent role of the Vidal Sassoon Academy wasunderscored by its description as “the Harvard of hairdressing.