I have mixed feelings about this book. His fundamental argument is generally (1) college students are miserably unhappy; (2) they're unhappy because they have no meaning or purpose in their life but instead are trained from birth to compete and be good students but not good thinkers; (3) society as a whole suffers when the "leadership class" is composed of technocrats seeking competence rather than leaders pursuing ideals; (4) the existing "meritocracy" is simply rebranded aristocracy insidiously shrouded in legitimacy; and (5) the entire system serves the interests of the one-percenters but fails society as a whole.

In large part, I agree with his conclusions. I see shades of Piketty's Capital and Hayes' Twilight of the Elites, but this is a better written, more engaging, more fluid read. His views on the elite college admissions system certainly ring true to my own situation--I grew up a poor, rural, white, 1st-gen college student who attended an elite university, and I wholeheartedly echo his reflections on the state of "diversity" in elite universities: here's a rich, secular humanist white kid from Massachusetts who attended a prep feeder school, here's a rich, secular humanist Asian kid from California who attended a prep feeder school, here's a rich, secular humanist black kid from D.C. who attended a prep feeder school, here's a rich, secular humanist Arab kid from New Jersey who attended a prep feeder school, aren't we all so incredibly diverse?

While I agree with his description of the problem, I'm not sure I agree with his diagnosis. In particular, he asserts that the dearth of values/principles results from our technocratic fetish and emphasis on vocational training, and that the best way to resolve this is to find meaning and purpose through art, literature, and engaging seminars in the humanities. As a humanities major myself, I don't disagree with what he's saying, but he's essentially doubling-down on secular humanism, outlining what appears to be a stepped-up version that takes the good parts of religion (here's your transcendence, meaning, eternal principals, and community) but leaves out the thorny moral questions.

But I feel compelled to ask, rather than seek out a non-transcendental substitute for the real thing, why not find transcendence at its source? If the problem with our leadership class today is a lack of rootedness in values and character (as opposed to an ill-defined earlier time when this apparently wasn't a problem), why try to find those values in secular humanism and not in religion? He grants early on that religious institutions appear to be addressing those questions better than elite universities (and, somewhat ironically, he even slyly denigrates these second-class institutions, seeming surprised that the mouth-breathers can even formulate such weighty questions!). But he fails to follow through on the logic that if narrow-minded morons at poor institutions (tongue-in-cheek) can find the meaning he's looking for, then one can only imagine the results that could be obtained with smart students at good institutions approaching things the same way.

If the problem with college students today (and the leadership class tomorrow) is a lack of character, values, drive, passion, love, and community, it seems to me more an indictment of the drive to remove the transcendent from the public sphere.

Notwithstanding the above, this book made me think, and it certainly deserves its place atop the bestseller lists.