College Learning for the New Global Century: A Report from the National Leadership Council for Liberal Education and America's Promise

The LEAP report was released by the National Leadership Council on January 10, 2007, and shared with the AAC&U community at a special plenary session at the 2007 annual meeting in New Orleans. The National Leadership Council is the public voice of the LEAP campaign , and includes members of the business, educational, civic, and philanthropic communities. Following is the executive summary of the LEAP report.

College Learning for the New Global Century is a report about the aims and outcomes of a twenty-first-century college education. It is also a report about the promises we need to make-and keep-to all students who aspire to a college education, especially to those for whom college is a route, perhaps the only possible route, to a better future.

With college education more important than ever before, both to individual opportunity and to American prosperity, policy attention has turned to a new set of priorities: the expansion of access, the reduction of costs, and accountability for student success.

These issues are important, but something equally important has been left off the table.

Across all the discussion of access, affordability, and even accountability, there has been a near-total public and policy silence about what contemporary college graduates need to know and be able to do.

This report fills that void. It builds from the recognition, already widely shared, that in a demanding economic and international environment, Americans will need further learning beyond high school.

The National Leadership Council for Liberal Education and America's Promise (LEAP) takes that recognition to the next level, asking: What kinds of learning? To what ends? Beyond access to college, how should Americans define "success" in college achievement?

The council believes that the policy commitment to expanded college access must be anchored in an equally strong commitment to educational excellence. Student success in college cannot be documented-as it usually is-only in terms of enrollment, persistence, and degree attainment. These widely used metrics, while important, miss entirely the question of whether students who have placed their hopes for the future in higher education are actually achieving the kind of learning they need for life, work, and citizenship.

The public and policy inattention to the aims, scope, and level of student learning in college threatens to erode the...