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Higher education is an odd business. Its primary input—money—is easily quantified and valued. Its primary output is much harder to value, or even define. Is it the advancement of knowledge? A better educated citizenry? A well-trained workforce? A winning football team? Does education aim at promoting the general welfare, or does it primarily endow certain fortunate individuals with greater social status and, one hopes, advanced knowledge and intellectual skills? Is higher education a great engine of social mobility or a great enforcer of privilege? Whatever one defines as the product of higher education, its relationship to the cost of producing it is mysterious to most people. Ultimately, higher education in the United States rests heavily on the tuition-paying and tax-paying public’s confidence that the whole enterprise is worth it. But today colleges and universities are facing the greatest challenges they’ve encountered in more than 50 years, the root cause of which amounts to a crisis of confidence. Jeffrey Selingo’s book College (Un)Bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students can be read as an account of the origins and effects of this crisis o