In other words: we’re here to tell you everything you should know about Chaucer, not to fix your life.

To look at Nisbet’s plaintive book alongside Deresiewicz’s is a beer-goggles experience. For all its reactionary bluster, “The Degradation of the Academic Dogma” was perceptive and prescient. The turn it traced, from Western-canon “knowledge” to scholarship drawing on the outside world, marked a seam not only in the culture of the university but in postwar intellectual life more generally. The seam runs through Deresiewicz, but it is squiggly. He wants the aloof focus of the old university. He also wants the broader cultural responsibility of the new one. His book attempts to sweep away the fatuous ambition of college today, but it falls back on another, less cohesive set of myths.

The collision of old and new ideals is clearest when it comes to the gnarly socioeconomics of collegiate education. The professors at the old university were, with few exceptions, white, male, trained through direct lineage, and self-selected for an interest in the Western canon. The students at the élite schools were mostly patrician, also white and male, and, owing to these and other factors, not terribly anxious about their post-graduation circumstances. Deresiewicz is right that today’s college students are more risk-averse. That’s partly because there’s much more risk to be averse to. A Yalie of the Nick Carraway generation could afford to “stand outside the world for a few years,” as Deresiewicz puts it. It cost nothing: a Wall Street job awaited.

Today, the markets wait for nobody, and leaving college with nothing except your course credits makes you exactly one of nearly two million Americans, most of them job-seeking, who received a bachelor’s diploma this year. (About a million more took higher degrees.) Credentialism—the pursuit of markers of success for distinction in the eyes of strangers—is what happens when you wipe away the grime of old-boy exclusivity. And the cost of a college education isn’t easy to ignore. Deresiewicz bristles at the idea that unprofitable pursuits, like philosophy or travel, are “self-indulgent” for young people at the cusp of graduation. “Going into consulting isn’t self-indulgent?” he protests, railing at the assumptions of the money-minded. “It’s not okay to study history, because what good does that really do anyone, but it is okay to work for a hedge fund. It’s selfish to pursue your passion, unless it’s going to make you a lot of money, in which case it isn’t selfish at all.”

His complaint is sound, but these quandaries are distinctly middle-class. Deresiewicz suggests that someone who grew up poor should be at least as eager to turn down the lucrative consulting job and take a risky road as anybody else. “If you grow up with less, you are much better able to deal with having less,” he counsels. “That is itself a kind of freedom.” The advice seems cheap. When an impoverished student at Stanford, the first in his family to go to college, opts for a six-figure salary in finance after graduation, a very different but equally compelling kind of “moral imagination” may be at play. (Imagine being able to pay off your loans and never again having to worry about keeping a roof over your family’s heads.) William S. Burroughs, a corporate scion of élite genealogy, began reinventing himself at Harvard as a louche explorer of the underworld. Why shouldn’t someone who grew up in a crack-blighted neighborhood be equally free to reimagine himself as a suit?

Like many before him, Deresiewicz points out that the promise of pure meritocracy is something of a farce. In 1985, only forty-six per cent of students at the two hundred and fifty most selective colleges were from the top quarter of income distribution; a decade and a half later, fifty-five per cent of the students were. This is thought to be in part because of a growing commercial test-preparation industry, and because enrichment culture, like music lessons and service trips abroad, is a part of bourgeois life. S.A.T. scores track with the level of both parental education and parental wealth. The upper middle reproduces itself in the guise of the best kids rising to the top. “Affirmative action should be based on class instead of race, a change that many have been calling for for years,” Deresiewicz writes. It is his strategy for breaking the upper-middle-class cycle, and it’s a reasonable notion. But it requires viewing college as a socioeconomic elevator: you go in disadvantaged and you come out comfortable, thanks to the fine job you got, thanks to the credentials and connections you acquired along the way. It is the very model that Deresiewicz has been urging us to smash.

So which is it? Is élite college the idyll where intellectually curious young people find the time to engage with the great books and those who love them; learn from one another without impingement from the outside world; and then leap off the cliff of the unknown? Or is it the launching pad, where, in exchange for hard work and some forward planning, students—most crucially, those from marginalized communities—are positioned for careers worthy of their capabilities and a long-term safety net? “I used to think that we needed to create a world where every child had an equal chance to get to the Ivy League,” he writes. “I’ve come to see that what we really need is to create one where you don’t have to go to the Ivy League, or any private college, to get a first-rate education.”

Fortunately, that world already exists. It’s possible to get a topnotch education at any number of public universities and liberal-arts colleges, both of which Deresiewicz cites as alternatives to the Ivies. He has learned that you can get great seminar teaching, liberal-artsy students, and idyllic apartness at small schools like Kenyon and Reed. And he has seen that you can find diversity at large public institutions such as the University of California. How distinguishing are these features, though? Outside the classroom, Reed boasts its own flavor of extracurriculars, career-tracking events, and service outreach. (There is even a proprietary “leadership development” program.) U.C.L.A. offers fifty-eight freshman seminars this fall, on topics ranging from Martin Buber to space meteorology. Beginning with steep and far-reaching admissions standards, both show the sins and the saving graces of a school like Yale. The spectrum of liberal-arts institutions is both narrower and more continuous than Deresiewicz allows.

Nor are its tensions new. Edward III, lauding the University of Oxford in 1355, singled out not only its scholarship but the way that it funnelled smart people into statecraft. Harvard’s foundational charter, from 1650, is largely a document about who is allowed to elicit “sundry gifts, legacies, lands, and revenues for the advancement of all good literature, arts, and sciences” from the pocketbooks of people around town—a project to which the university remains impressively committed. The awkward balance between mind and matter, academics and ambition, doesn’t pervert college’s native mission. From the earliest days of the institution, it has been the fragile nature of the thing itself.

A chief terror of higher education for a lot of students isn’t the exams, or the term papers, or even the terribly narrow but weirdly long bunk beds. It is the choice involved in working through an uncharted terrain whose potential is reported to be limitless. That task is a microcosm of life. The mystery of what will matter, how the pieces will in hindsight fit together, is equally pressing for the overachiever and for Deresiewicz’s risk-seeking soul person. And, despite what Deresiewicz fears, it’s possible to build a vivid and enduring education in the rush of large, élite schools. That may, in some sense, be the point. The stresses of an era can’t be wished away; the truest intellectual training could be how to stay calm, and keep thinking clearly, in the high-strung culture in which students need to make their lives.