Goals: The Intended Outcomes of Higher Education

This chapter represents a systematic effort to identify widely accepted goals of higher education. Education, or the teaching-learning function, is defined to embrace not only the formal academic curricula, classes, and laboratories but also all those influences upon students flowing from association with peers and faculty members and from the many and varied experiences of campus life. Distinctions among the cognitive, affective, and practical goals are blurred, and there is much overlap among them. The goals of education are usually expressed as characteristics, skills, abilities, competencies, dispositions, motivations, sensibilities, orientations, commitments and understandings. The goal of verbal skill, a subgoal under cognitive learning, implies effective verbal communication as a desired behavior of later life. The chapter refers the three primary goals of education as the personal development of students with respect to their cognitive abilities, their affective characteristics, and their practical competence.