Duke University, where I graduated in 2002, was as lenient about student infractions—underage drinking, excessive noise, hazing—as most private universities. But there was a limit to its paternal forgiveness: on-campus interviews with company representatives. Miss one, and you'd have to go through a humiliating rigmarole of apologies and counseling. Miss a second one, and you were barred for life from interviewing on campus.

But the investment banks, hedge funds, consulting firms, and other big name employers on campus didn't have to play by those rules. They showed up late or not at all to company presentations, promised jobs that weren't coming, and didn't even bother telling applicants they'd interviewed that they weren't hiring you.

The hierarchy was clear and so was the message: The corporation is king. Duke would teach you all sorts of things, many of them quite leftist, but when it came down to it you couldn’t disrespect the harsh economics that keep a modern university going. As the career center puts it, not playing by the rules is “unprofessional and jeopardizes Duke's reputation in the employment community as well as your own.”

Duke is a business, as are all colleges, and everyone has their job. The professors cared more about their real job (publishing in academic journals) than teaching. The administrators were corporate types who spent most of their time fundraising. The overwhelmingly white fraternities maintained their privileged treatment (which included getting the best housing on campus) with meaningless community service projects. The students were taught, usually not very thoroughly and mostly by an overburdened set of graduate students and part-time instructors. But at least they got an easy curriculum and impressive résumé out of the bargain. And attached to it all was the basketball industrial complex, a multimillion dollar enterprise awkwardly selling itself as caring about the educational prospects of its athletes. It was a massive system built not around education, but status.

Some university presidents are remarkably candid about how they’ve transformed their institutions to serve market imperatives. Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, the former president of George Washington University, acknowledges that he worked to transform the school into a luxury brand. “College is like vodka, he liked to explain,” the New York Times reported in February. “Vodka is by definition a flavorless beverage. It all tastes the same. But people will spend $30 for a bottle of Absolut because of the brand.” The implication: All higher education is the same. Some schools are just cooler than others.