This document is intended to stimulate discussion and debate on how student affairs professionals can intentionally create the conditions that enhance student learning and personal development. However, this dichotomy has little relevance to post-college life, where the quality of one's job performance, family life, and community activities are all highly dependent on cognitive and affective skills. Peer group relations, for example, appear to influence both affective and cognitive development. For these reasons, the terms learning, student development, and personal development are used interchangeably throughout this document. Indeed almost any educationally purposeful experience may be a precursor to desired outcomes.
Some settings tend to be associated with certain kinds of outcomes more so than others.
For example, classrooms and laboratories emphasize knowledge acquisition among other things while living in a campus residence, serving as an officer of a campus organization, or working offer opportunities to apply knowledge obtained in the classroom and to develop practical competencies. Environments can be intentionally designed to promote student learning. Knowledge and understanding are critical, not only to student success, but also to institutional improvement. To encourage student involvement in learning tasks, thereby improving institutional productivity, the outcomes associated with college attendance must be assessed systematically and the impact of various policies and programs on learning and personal development periodically evaluated. Student affairs professionals are educators who share responsibility with faculty, academic administrators, other staff, and students themselves for creating the conditions under which students are likely to expend time and energy in educationally-purposeful activities.