Laura Marcus, who is 30, is one such kindred spirit. She was an overachieving high school student in Indiana when she read about Deep Springs and became enthralled. “So much of the effort I was putting forth was only to polish my own G.P.A. and résumé. I was staring down the barrel of a college education that seemed to be a continuation of that same mode,” she told me. “I felt jaded.”

She was devastated to learn that Deep Springs admitted only men (the college welcomed its first female students last fall). After graduating from Yale in 2010, Ms. Marcus founded a Deep Springs-style program for women: the Arete Project, in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina. She has recently opened a second, coed program in rural Alaska.

The Arete Project — the Greek word means “excellence” in the broadest sense — calls itself “education for citizenship, stewardship and leadership.” It operates on a “pay what you can” model and bans alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and recreational drugs. The project began as a summer seminar with plans to grow into a yearlong undergraduate program (participants can earn college credit). Like Outer Coast, it immerses a small group of students in the demands of self-governance, study and manual labor. Students read a mix of “classical texts and contemporary texts,” Ms. Marcus said.

The curriculum has been a source of contention. “Some students feel strongly that Plato has a great deal to offer their intellectual situations, and some can’t believe they’re being asked to read a dead white man,” she told me. Moreover, romanticizing the pursuit of the pure “life of the mind” risks alienating working-class students. “For organizations that want to be accessible to students in all walks of life, as we do, that means having some kind of value proposition that translates into other parts of their life.”

The point of bringing students to live, work and read together is nothing short of “the cultivation of wisdom, the living of a good life in thought and action, and selfless devotion to world and humanity,” according to the Arete Project’s website. But what philosophical foundations underlie those ambitions?

“I do wonder whether or not it’s mission-critical for an educational institution to have a fully articulated metaphysics and ethics and politics that underpin it — or to what extent that is inhibitive to the broader project of liberal education,” Ms. Marcus told me. “There is a deep-seated human desire to feel you’re a part of something bigger than yourself, and one of the problems of liberal modernity is that it doesn’t give you a whole lot beyond the self to subsume yourself in. That gives secular institutions like ours a little bit of a question mark about what that grounding vision is going to be.”

Outer Coast and the Arete Project represent one strain of higher education reform: call them the communitarian pragmatists, with liberal arts for the mind, labor for the body and an ethos of secular monasticism for the spirit. They are the descendants of philosophers like John Dewey and educational entrepreneurs like Deep Springs College’s founder, L.L. Nunn.