If you build it, he will come.” A version of this movie maxim has been at the heart of facilities conversations in education ever since actor Kevin Costner first heard this ghostly admonition in Field of Dreams (Robinson 1989). Education’s version of this famous quote is “If you build it, they will come.” While Costner’s character was building a baseball field for a fabled generation of past professional baseball players, we have been focused on building our infrastructures for a new generation of learners. Year after year we look at Beloit College’s mindset list to ready ourselves (Beloit College n.d.). The students in the coming class of 2011, for example, never knew a world with the Berlin Wall or without bottled water. In their world, MTV has never featured music videos and Nelson Mandela has never been in prison. They were born the year Harvard Law Review editor Barack Obama announced he might run for office some day.

While this focus on a new generation of 18- to 20-year-old students is vital to ready us for the educational road ahead, it is only part of the conversation. Indeed, students are now swirling in and out of education at all ages and stages (Adelman 1999; de los Santos and Milliron 2007; Milliron and Leach 1997; Milliron and Wilson 2004). This diversity of student flow seriously stretches current recruitment and retention strategies, particularly if you lead a state university or community college. In addition to first-time freshmen coming straight from high school, we now increasingly serve working students, part-time students, and adult learners (who are often in career transition). Many of these students are the first in their families to attend college, must work to pay for their education, and  

Mark David Milliron, Kathleen Plinske, Coral Noonan-Terry. 2008. Building a New Generation of Learning: Conversations to Catalyze our Construction. Planning for Higher Education. 37(1): 7–14.