What is the point of attending college? For many, that question has as many answers as there are college students. Some students are simply hoping to have the quintessential college experience, others are looking to discover their passions, while still others are preparing for pre-professional training in engineering, medicine, or law. But what should the primary goals of colleges be? In College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be, 2nd Edition (Princeton University Press, 2023), Andrew Delbanco takes up this challenge, arguing that colleges should provide students with not only intellectual formation but moral formation as well, helping them become the kinds of citizens who deeply understand the world as well as take on the responsibilities that they have to their communities.

Tracing the historical development of colleges, Delbanco makes that case that colleges were not thought of as simply about transmitting knowledge. Rather, they were about forming one’s character. Even the founding president of Johns Hopkins University, hardly a small, regional college, thought that higher education was not “merely a place for the advancement of knowledge or for the acquisition of learning; it will always be a place for the development of character” (42). Delbanco maintains a focus on this vision throughout, exploring the ways that colleges are not meant solely for individual economic advancement, but the betterment of society as a whole. With new material on the post-COVID university life, along with chapters that consider administrative bloat, grade inflation, and questions of equity and social justice, Delbanco’s work is both timely and challenging, exploring both what college is as well as a vision for how to recreate it moving forward.