From the perspective of many faculty, the "real" problem is the quality of students, their qualifications and their unwillingness to take responsibility for full participation in higher education. When combined with a consumerist mentality, this is a volatile mix. At times, the measure of student quality is reduced to a preoccupation with Scholastic Aptitude Test scores of entering freshmen, despite our understanding that what good students bring goes far beyond any standardized test, and evidence that such tests are not good predictors of student performance.

In the George Mason context, this situation is exacerbated by a concern that students' energy and commitments are fragmented, with obligations to work, family and education competing, and overloaded. In more general terms, the disconnections between students' academic lives and the rest of their life experiences is at issue. Coherence and integration are missing ingredients. If we advocate learning as our measure of quality, we redirect our efforts toward strategies that enhance and deepen the learning our students achieve, and toward reconnecting their lives in support of that learning.