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  • Promoting Reasonable Expectations: Aligning Student and Institutional Views of the College Experience
  • Anna M. Ortiz (bio)
Thomas E. Miller, George D. Kuh, and John H. Schuh. Promoting Reasonable Expectations: Aligning Student and Institutional Views of the College Experience. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005. 288 pp. Cloth: 36.00. ISBN: 0-7879-7624-5.

Meeting the expectations that students hold of their college experiences is like hitting a moving target for most university administrators, faculty, and staff. These expectations change over time. They are also built over time—influenced by culture, educational experiences, family, the media and popular culture— variables that differ for each student. The consequences for unmet expectations are high. Disappointed students fail to optimize their college experience, leave institutions, and sometimes abandon higher education all together.

The authors of Promoting Reasonable Expectations: Aligning Student and Institutional Views of the College Experience explore just what those expectations are, charge that institutions focus more on communicating their expectations of students than on meeting student expectations, and challenge educators to refocus on helping students develop more appropriate expectations and on working to meet those expectations. They assert that enrollment management practices and the competitive climate for recruiting students lead to the development of unreasonable expectations as admissions officers and institutional publications portray visions of college life that may not be realized by students. The push to attract highly qualified students and to meet enrollment management targets on which many institutional budgets rely clouds the primary goal of the college choice process: finding the best institutional fit for each student.

The work of Thomas Miller, George Kuh, John Schuh, and their associates originated in the Reasonable Expectations project commissioned by the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators. Prominent association leaders, university administrators, and scholars form the teams of authors for each chapter. Psychological contract theory, the book's theoretical frame, explains that, when parties are in relationship with each other, psychological contracts develop that form expectations for those relationships. Dissonance occurs when the contract is breached. A well-written Chapter 2 explains this theory and relates it to higher education.

Two chapters describe what students expect from college and whether those expectations are met. Three chapters address specific expectations for campus services, financing college, persistence and degree attainment, and for life after college. A separate chapter focuses on the expectations of diverse groups of students and another on expectations unique to different types of institutions. The book ends with a discussion of the public and societal expectations of higher education and commentary solicited from higher education leaders and university presidents.

The most unusual feature of the book is its use of multiple data sources to present the arguments of each chapter. The book relies heavily on data collected through the College Student Expectations Questionnaire and the College Student Experiences Questionnaire, but it also uses findings from the Cooperative Institutional Research Project and from other sources such as ACT Alumni Survey. While many of the findings are well known and have been reported elsewhere, this collaborative effort is a creative model of how higher education researchers can collectively use the wealth of information embedded in our many national datasets to better understand critical issues for students and institutions.

Many chapters in the book provide instructive analyses of data on student expectations that point [End Page 416] to policy issues, many of which concern access and equity. In general, students overestimate the cost of a college education, although, simultaneously, their families underplan for the cost of a college education. This mismatch may lead to selecting a low-cost institution like a community college, even after the student is admitted to a four-year university. First-generation college students have lower expectations for involvement in various college curricular and co-curricular activities. Given the extensive research on the benefits of involvement, are first-generation college students realizing these same benefits, or are they receiving positive outcomes from fundamentally different, but equally valuable factors?

Nearly all students expect to graduate from the same institution in which they begin their college career; however, the likelihood of attending more than one college has steadily increased over time. Does this finding indicate that students increasingly have unmet...

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