In his new book, Alexander Astin, founding director of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, takes aim at a fundamental failure in the current approach to higher education. Astin believes that our colleges and universities are focused on finding and recruiting the smartest students, narrowly defined, in pursuit of prestige, rather than developing the smartness of ALL students, which is their stated mission. He believes that we need to expand the kinds of “smartness” that students need to succeed in life, and then accurately measure whether the education they get is helping to develop these skills and abilities, so that students, their parents, and employers all know that the investment in higher education is worthwhile.