There’s Clara, who should be joyful — she has no financial worries and many excellent college options — but is bullied by her parents to bypass Middlebury, which she prefers, for Yale, which is yet more exclusive. Hers isn’t a sob story, I know. But it’s a dispiriting confirmation of the bragging rights and brand obsession that pervert higher education today.

Along with Shannen’s distress, it may also help explain why more and more college students report and seek help for mental health issues. According to the American College Health Association, the percentage of students who profess a degree of anxiety that affects their studies has risen to 27.8 from 18.5 a decade earlier. The percentage who say that about depression has risen to 20.2 from 11.6.

In rural North Carolina, Tough meets and interviews Kim, whose working-class family doesn’t do much to encourage her ambition. She gets into Clemson all on her own. Then she can’t go, not right away, because the math of paying for it just doesn’t work. Her optimism collides with — and is put seriously to the test by — the punishingly high cost of college in a country where, according to the Federal Reserve, there are more than 44 million borrowers who owe $1.6 trillion in student loan debt.

KiKi nets the scholarships and financial aid she needs for Princeton. But she finds herself in such a tiny minority of poor students there that she feels culturally adrift. She’s routinely reminded of and stressed by the social and economic divisions between her and other students. Tough’s reporting makes clear how painfully common this experience is, because despite the most elite schools’ pledges and boasts about diversifying their campuses, they’re still theaters of extraordinary affluence, with screening practices that keep them that way.

All in all the landscape of higher education in America is forbidding to students of limited means. Many of them enter college academically behind their wealthier peers, who got better K-through-12 educations, and schools do too little to help them catch up. Many are lured to for-profit institutions that rake in money while failing to deliver on their promises.

And that has dire consequences not just individually but also nationally. To spur innovation, compete globally and nurture prosperity in a country where factory jobs have ceased to be the answer, we need more, better college graduates. So why aren’t we doing more to create them?

Near the end of his book, Tough recalls the high school movement of the early 20th century, when industrialization called for a more skilled work force and America responded by making sure more of its citizens finished high school. Only 9 percent of them did in 1910. By 1940, that figure was up to 50 percent.