Undergraduate enrollments have grown sixfold in the last half-century and continue to boom; today more than 80 percent of high-school graduates go to college within approximately eight years of graduation. One might expect those accomplishments to be celebrated, but the expansion of higher education has been accompanied by ambivalence, anxiety, and opposition. As enrollments continue to climb, the intensity of criticism grows even louder. Public colleges admit that graduation rates are scandalously low, students take too long to graduate, and university graduates lack appropriate job skills. Last fall's report by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings' Commission on the Future of Higher Education followed suit in calling for more institutional accountability for what students learn and for graduating them faster and at less cost. In this article, the authors state that many of the questions policy makers ask are distorted by conceptual blinders that evaluate today's undergraduate experience against a norm from an earlier era when students entered college immediately after high school, attended college full time, lived in dormitories, and rarely worked for pay because they were financially dependent on their parents. They further state that the methods currently used to determine college-completion rates produce a warped and outdated picture of how today's students experience and benefit from higher education, and that a better focus for reform would be those aspects of educational policy that stack the deck against disadvantaged students.