College What It Was Is And Should Be Andrew Delbanco

Reading Delbanco's Book on the State of Higher Education

Andrew Delbanco's College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be is one of those books that actually matters if you care about where American universities are heading. It's not a get-rich-quick guide or a self-help manual. It's a serious examination of what college was meant to be, how it got here, and whether it has any reasonable path forward. I picked it up after years of working in academic policy and watching tuition climb while graduation rates stayed stubbornly flat. The book landed right in that tension. Delbanco isn't just critiquing the system. He's arguing from inside it. He's a literature professor at Columbia. He's seen the machinery up close. That gives his criticism some weight it wouldn't have coming from an outsider.

The Core Argument in College What It Was Is And Should Be Andrew Delbanco

The book starts with an ideal. The medieval university model, the German research university model, the liberal arts ideal — these are all treated as historical attempts to answer one question: what should college actually be for? Delbanco traces how each era tried to solve that problem. The Roman Catholic university served theology. The 19th-century land-grant movement served practical economics. The research university served knowledge production. Each had a vision. Each had consequences. Where the book gets sharp is in its analysis of the modern crisis. Delbanco argues that American higher education has lost its philosophical center. It's become a marketplace. Students are consumers. Faculty are service providers. Administration is corporate management. The language itself has shifted from education to outcomes, from learning to return on investment. This isn't a sudden change. It built over decades. The funding model shifted. Government stopped subsidizing education the way it used to. States pulled back. Tuition picked up the gap. The logic changed from public good to private return. Here's something most people miss reading this. Delbanco doesn't actually propose a single policy fix. That's not the point of the book. It's diagnostic. He wants you to understand the trajectory before you can argue about direction. The book's real contribution is making clear that the current system isn't a malfunction. It's working exactly as the incentives currently shape it. Fixing it requires changing the incentives, not just the rhetoric.

What Actually Makes This Book Useful

I've seen a lot of books like this. Most of them either rant or stay safely abstract. Delbanco manages to be both specific and general enough. He uses concrete examples — the decline of state funding per student, the rise of adjunct labor, the restructuring of the tenured faculty position — without getting lost in data dumps. The numbers matter but they serve the argument. One section that stuck with me deals with the concept of the university as a "community of scholars." That phrase gets thrown around a lot. Delbanco takes it apart. What does it mean when most teaching is done by contingent faculty who don't get to participate in governance? What does shared governance actually look like when administrative power has expanded faster than faculty authority? He doesn't offer easy answers. The questions themselves are the value. Another thing the book handles well is the international comparison angle. Other countries fund higher education differently. Germany tuitions are near zero. France has a centralized system. Japan has different pressures. Delbanco uses these comparisons without treating them as blueprints. The point is that the American model is contingent, not inevitable. That matters for anyone trying to advocate for change.

The Weak Points

I'll be direct about where the book falls short. Delbanco writes from an elite institutional perspective. Columbia is not community college. The problems he describes are real, but they hit different institutions at different intensities. A student at an underfunded state school faces different barriers than one at a well-endowed private college. The book doesn't fully address that variance. There's also a generational blind spot. Delbanco is writing for people who remember when college felt different. That's valuable. But younger readers, current students, people actually navigating the system now might find the nostalgic undertone frustrating. The future-oriented sections are weaker than the historical ones. He diagnoses well. The prescription is more vague than some readers will want. I also ran into a practical issue when trying to use this book in a syllabus or discussion group. The citations and references are solid but not exhaustive. Some of the claims about funding trends would benefit from more granular data. If you're writing a paper or preparing a talk based on this, you'll want to cross-reference with actual IPEDS data and AACRAO reports. The book gives you the framework. You fill in the specifics yourself.

How I've Used This Book in Practice

I've assigned this in graduate seminars on higher education policy. Students initially come in either as full believers in the system or complete cynics. The book does something useful in the middle. It creates space for people who want to reform higher education without pretending it's beyond repair. That's a rare position in current discourse. One specific edge case I encountered: I was preparing a presentation for a state higher education board about funding priorities. Someone brought up Delbanco's argument that the market model is self-reinforcing. I needed to connect that to concrete budget decisions. The book itself doesn't give you line items. What worked for me was pairing his framework with a simple cost-per-degree analysis from my own state's higher education agency. The combination made the argument stick in a way neither source could alone. Delbanco gives you the why. The data gives you the what and how much. Another thing I found useful: the chapter on the liberal arts tradition. Not as a defense of the canon, but as an argument for intellectual breadth. I've used that framing in budget discussions where programs get cut for being "impractical." The reframing from impractical to foundational has actually shifted conversations in rooms where it matters. That's not because the argument is airtight. It's because it gives people language they didn't have before.

Who Should Read This

If you're in higher education administration, this will sharpen arguments you're already having. If you're a faculty member, it will validate frustrations you probably don't have the vocabulary for yet. If you're a student or parent trying to decide whether college is worth it, this won't give you a yes or no answer. It will give you a better set of questions. The book is published by Princeton University Press. It runs about 220 pages. Not a heavy read but not a light one either. You'll want to slow down through the middle chapters. The introduction and the final chapter on the future can be absorbed faster. The historical sections in the middle deserve your attention because that's where Delbanco builds the foundation for everything that follows. I keep coming back to it. Not because it changes my mind about anything fundamental. But because it reminds me why the arguments matter in the first place. The system isn't broken because people are bad. It's structured in ways that make the outcomes predictable. Understanding that structure is the only starting point for anything else.