It would be nice to conclude that, despite these anxieties, and given the somewhat contradictory goals that have been set for it, the American higher-education system is doing what Americans want it to do. College is broadly accessible: sixty-eight per cent of high-school graduates now go on to college (in 1980, only forty-nine per cent did), and employers continue to reward the credential, which means that there is still some selection going on. In 2008, the average income for someone with an advanced degree (master’s, professional, or doctoral) was $83,144; for someone with a bachelor’s degree, it was $58,613; for someone with only a high-school education, it was $31,283.

There is also increasing global demand for American-style higher education. Students all over the world want to come here, and some American universities, including N.Y.U. and Yale, are building campuses overseas. Higher education is widely regarded as the route to a better life. It is sometimes pointed out that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg were college dropouts. It is unnecessary to point out that most of us are not Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg.

It’s possible, though, that the higher education system only looks as if it’s working. The process may be sorting, students may be getting access, and employers may be rewarding, but are people actually learning anything? Two recent books suggest that they are not. They suggest it pretty emphatically.

“Academically Adrift” (Chicago; $25) was written by two sociologists, Richard Arum (N.Y.U.) and Josipa Roksa (University of Virginia). Almost a third of it, sixty-eight pages, is a methodological appendix, which should give the general reader a clue to what to expect. “Academically Adrift” is not a diatribe based on anecdote and personal history and supported by some convenient data, which is what books critical of American higher education often are. It’s a social-scientific attempt to determine whether students are learning what colleges claim to be teaching them—specifically, “to think critically, reason analytically, solve problems, and communicate clearly.”

Arum and Roksa consider Theory 1 to be “overly cynical.” They believe that the job of the system is to teach people, not just to get them up the right educational ladders and down the right career chutes. They think that some people just aren’t capable of learning much at the college level. But they think that people who do go to college ought to be able to show something for the time and expense.

The authors decided that, despite a lot of rhetoric about accountability in higher education, no one seemed eager to carry out an assessment, so they did their own. They used a test known as the Collegiate Learning Assessment, or C.L.A. The test has three parts, though they use data from just one part, the “performance task.” Students are, for example, assigned to advise “an employer about the desirability of purchasing a type of airplane that has recently crashed,” and are shown documents, such as news articles, an F.A.A. accident report, charts, and so on, and asked to write memos. The memos are graded for “critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving, and writing.”

The test was given to a group of more than two thousand freshmen in the fall of 2005, and again, to the same group, in the spring of 2007. Arum and Roksa say that forty-five per cent of the students showed no significant improvement, and they conclude that “American higher education is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students.”

The study design raises a lot of questions, from the reasonableness of assessing learning growth after only three full semesters of college to the reliability of the C.L.A. itself. The obvious initial inference to make about a test that does not pick up a difference where you expect one is that it is not a very good test. And, even if the test does measure some skills accurately, the results say nothing about whether students have acquired any knowledge, or socially desirable attitudes, that they didn’t have before they entered college.

There are other reasons for skepticism. It’s generally thought (by their professors, anyway) that students make a developmental leap after sophomore year—although Arum and Roksa, in a follow-up study completed after their book was finished, determined that, after four years, thirty-six per cent of students still did not show significant improvement on the C.L.A. But what counts as significant in a statistical analysis is a function of where you set the bar. Alexander Astin, the dean of modern higher-education research, who is now an emeritus professor at U.C.L.A., published a sharp attack on Arum and Roksa’s methodology in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and, in particular, on the statistical basis for the claim that forty-five per cent of college students do not improve.

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Even leaving the C.L.A. results aside, though, “Academically Adrift” makes a case for concern. Arum and Roksa argue that many students today perceive college as fundamentally a social experience. Students spend less time studying than they used to, for example. In 1961, students reported studying for an average of twenty-five hours a week; the average is now twelve to thirteen hours. More than a third of the students in Arum and Roksa’s study reported that they spent less than five hours a week studying. In a University of California survey, students reported spending thirteen hours a week on schoolwork and forty-three hours socializing and pursuing various forms of entertainment.

Few people are fully reliable reporters of time use. But if students are studying less it may be because the demands on them are fewer. Half the students in the study said that they had not taken a single course in the previous semester requiring more than twenty pages of writing. A third said that they had not taken a course requiring more than forty pages of reading a week. Arum and Roksa point out that professors have little incentive to make their courses more rigorous. Professors say that the only aspect of their teaching that matters professionally is student course evaluations, since these can figure in tenure and promotion decisions. It’s in professors’ interest, therefore, for their classes to be entertaining and their assignments not too onerous. They are not deluded: a study carried out back in the nineteen-nineties (by Alexander Astin, as it happens) found that faculty commitment to teaching is negatively correlated with compensation.

Still, Arum and Roksa believe that some things do make a difference. First of all, students who are better prepared academically for college not only do better when they get to college; they improve more markedly while they’re there. And students who take courses requiring them to write more than twenty pages a semester and to read more than forty pages a week show greater improvement.

The most interesting finding is that students majoring in liberal-arts fields—sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities—do better on the C.L.A., and show greater improvement, than students majoring in non-liberal-arts fields such as business, education and social work, communications, engineering and computer science, and health. There are a number of explanations. Liberal-arts students are more likely to take courses with substantial amounts of reading and writing; they are more likely to attend selective colleges, and institutional selectivity correlates positively with learning; and they are better prepared academically for college, which makes them more likely to improve. The students who score the lowest and improve the least are the business majors.

Sixty per cent of American college students are not liberal-arts majors, though. The No. 1 major in America is, in fact, business. Twenty-two per cent of bachelor’s degrees are awarded in that field. Ten per cent are awarded in education, seven per cent in the health professions. More than twice as many degrees are given out every year in parks, recreation, leisure, and fitness studies as in philosophy and religion. Since 1970, the more higher education has expanded, the more the liberal-arts sector has shrunk in proportion to the whole.

Neither Theory 1 nor Theory 2 really explains how the educational system works for these non-liberal-arts students. For them, college is basically a supplier of vocational preparation and a credentialling service. The theory that fits their situation—Theory 3—is that advanced economies demand specialized knowledge and skills, and, since high school is aimed at the general learner, college is where people can be taught what they need in order to enter a vocation. A college degree in a non-liberal field signifies competence in a specific line of work.

Theory 3 explains the growth of the non-liberal education sector. As work becomes more high-tech, employers demand more people with specialized training. It also explains the explosion in professional master’s programs. There are now well over a hundred master’s degrees available, in fields from Avian Medicine to Web Design and Homeland Security. Close to fourteen times as many master’s degrees are given out every year as doctorates. When Barack Obama and Arne Duncan talk about how higher education is the key to the future of the American economy, this is the sector they have in mind. They are not talking about the liberal arts.

Still, students pursuing vocational degrees are almost always required to take some liberal-arts courses. Let’s say that you want a bachelor’s degree in Culinary Arts Management, with a Beverage Management major, from the University of Nevada Las Vegas. (Hmm. I might have taken a wrong turn in my education somewhere.) To get this degree, U.N.L.V. requires you to take two courses in English (Composition and World Literature), one course in philosophy, one course in either history or political science, courses in chemistry, mathematics, and economics, and two electives in the arts and humanities. If your professional goal is, let’s say, running the beverage service at the Bellagio, how much effort are you going to put into that class on World Literature?

This is where Professor X enters the picture. Professor X is the nom de guerre of a man who has spent more than ten years working evenings (his day job is with the government) as an adjunct instructor at “Pembrook,” a private four-year institution, and “Huron State,” a community college that is evidently public. The academic motivation of the students at these schools is utilitarian. Most of them are trying to get jobs—as registered nurses or state troopers, for example—that require a college degree, and they want one thing and one thing only from Professor X: a passing grade.

Professor X published an article in The Atlantic a few years ago about his experiences. David Brooks mentioned the piece in his Times column, and it provoked a small digital storm. “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” (Viking; $25.95) is the book version. The author holds an M.F.A. in creative writing (he teaches composition and literature), and he writes in the style of mordant self-deprecation that is the approved M.F.A. mode for the memoir genre. He can be gratuitously snarky about his colleagues (though not about his students), but he’s smart and he’s generally good company. “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” has the same kind of worm’s-eye charm as Stephen Akey’s “College” (1996), a story of undergraduate misadventures at Glassboro State College, though “College” is funnier.

Professor X has entwined his take on teaching with episodes in his personal life involving the purchase of a house he could not afford and subsequent marital tension. These parts of the book are too vague to be engaging. If you are going to go down the confessional path, you have to come across with the lurid details. We never find out where Professor X lives, what his wife does, what his kids are like, or much else about him. This is a writer who obviously enjoys the protection of a pseudonym. “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” is one of those books about higher education that are based on anecdote and personal history and supported by some convenient data (sort of like this review, actually), but the story is worth hearing.

Professor X thinks that most of the students he teaches are not qualified to attend college. He also thinks that, as far as writing and literature are concerned, they are unteachable. But the system keeps pushing them through the human-capital processor. They attend either because the degree is a job requirement or because they’ve been seduced by the siren song “college for everyone.” X considers the situation analogous to the real-estate bubble: Americans are being urged to invest in something they can’t afford and don’t need. Why should you have to pass a college-level literature class if you want to be a state trooper? To show that you can tough it out with Henry James? As Professor X sees it, this is a case of over-selection.

It’s also socially inefficient. The X-Man notes that half of all Americans who enter college never finish, that almost sixty per cent of students who enroll in two-year colleges need developmental (that is, remedial) courses, and that less than thirty per cent of faculty in American colleges are tenure-track. That last figure was supplied by the American Federation of Teachers, and it may be a little low, but it is undeniable that more than half the teaching in American colleges is done by contingent faculty (that is, adjuncts) like Professor X.

This does not mean, of course, that students would learn more if they were taught by tenured professors. Professor X is an adjunct, but he is also a dedicated teacher, and anyone reading his book will feel that his students respect this. He reprints a couple of course evaluations that sum up his situation in two nutshells: