Once they’re in college, they don’t know what to do with themselves, so they jump through the only hoop that’s bathed in a spotlight: finance. He argues that many miss truer and more satisfying callings.

Image William Deresiewicz Credit... Mary Ann Halpin Photography

He notes that at many of the Top 10 liberal arts colleges — “places that are supposed to be about a different sort of education” — economics is the most popular major. In 2010, he writes, about half of all Harvard graduates had jobs lined up in finance or consulting.

Colleges conspire in this funneling. They are working, he writes, “to line up the major gifts a generation hence. As for the smattering of future artists and do-gooders, they’re there to balance the moral books (as well as furnish a few alumni to brag about).”

Little of what Mr. Deresiewicz has to say is entirely new. Ezra Pound got there first, 80 years ago, with the metaphor that supplies this book with its title. Real education must be limited to those who insist on knowing, Pound said in his book “ABC of Reading.” “The rest is merely sheepherding.”

But the author consistently peels off in interesting directions. He speaks directly to students, giving this advice, for example, about cracking the mold while at college: “Don’t talk to your parents more than once a week, or even better, once a month. Don’t tell them about your grades on papers or tests, or anything else about how you’re doing during the term.” He concludes this litany this way: “Make it clear to them that this is your experience, not theirs.”

(Note to my children: This is excellent advice. If you take it, I will kill you.)

He observes how Jewish kids like Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag, Woody Allen and Philip Roth were socialized academically and otherwise into American culture and “went on to take possession of it.” He has similar hopes for Asian and Latino kids. “Telling them to stick to medicine or finance is just another way,” he says, “of keeping those communities down.”

I had problems with “Excellent Sheep.” Even at 245 pages, it feels padded, especially with quotations from a thousand sources. I didn’t skim pages, but I wanted to. It gets self-helpy. (“The only real grade is this: how well you’ve lived your life.”) Mr. Deresiewicz is a hammering writer, one who could have taken advice from, say, Robert Hughes in his “Culture of Complaint” about nailing your points with saving wit.