Talk of the higher ed bubble is getting louder and louder, and some predict that this will be the next bloated American industry to burst. That talk centers on how tuition has skyrocketed in recent years, far outpacing the rate of inflation, so that schools can maintain spending patterns that are simply not sustainable–particularly in an era when state funding for colleges and universities is shrinking. The talk touches, too, on the devaluation of the college degree–how grade inflation has gone hand in hand with declining educational outcomes and reduced study time; how time to degree is getting longer and longer (we are now talking about six-year graduation rates, as so few manage to finish in four). And it describes how heartlessly schools exploit students’ naivete–and innumeracy–when, for example, they arrange massive loans for them to earn humanities degrees that will never bring in a salary capable of paying off the debt, or, for example, when law schools lure students into a six-figure hole with misleading information about what their earning capacity will be when they graduate. I could go on.

So much of it is about how students have been victimized by the system. And there is a lot of that. But there is also a story to be told about an awful corollary to the above–the almost nihilistic, often dangerous non-seriousness of students themselves. Craig Brandon’s The Five Year Party tells it:

“The Five-Year Party” provides the most vivid portrait of college life since Tom Wolfe’s 2004 novel, “I Am Charlotte Simmons.” The difference is that it isn’t fiction. The alcohol-soaked, sex-saturated, drug-infested campuses that Mr. Brandon writes about are real. His book is a roadmap for parents on how to steer clear of the worst of them.

Many of the schools Mr. Brandon describes are education-free zones, where students’ eternal obligations—do the assigned reading, participate in class, hand in assignments—no longer apply. The book’s title refers to the fact that only 30% of students enrolled in liberal-arts colleges graduate in four years. Roughly 60% take at least six years to get their degrees. That may be fine with many schools, whose administrators see dollar signs in those extra semesters.

In an effort to win applicants, Mr. Brandon says, colleges dumb down the curriculum and inflate grades, prod students to take out loans they cannot afford, and cover up date rape and other undergraduate crime. The members of the faculty go along with the administration’s insistence on lowering standards out of fear of losing their jobs.

As a former education reporter and a former writing instructor at Keene State College in New Hampshire, Mr. Brandon has both an insider’s and an outsider’s perspective on college life. While his focus is on the 10% of America’s 4,431 liberal-arts colleges that he categorizes as “party schools,” he applies many of his criticisms more widely—even to the nation’s top-tier universities.

Mr. Brandon is especially bothered by colleges’ obsession with secrecy and by what he sees as their misuse of the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which Congress passed in 1974. Ferpa made student grade reports off-limits to parents. But many colleges have adopted an expansive view of Ferpa, claiming that the law applies to all student records. Schools are reluctant to give parents any information about their children, even when it concerns academic, disciplinary and health matters that might help mom and dad nip a problem in the bud.

Such policies can have tragic consequences, as was the case with a University of Kansas student who died of alcohol poisoning in 2009 and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology student who committed suicide in 2000. In both instances there were warning signs, but the parents were not notified. Ferpa’s most notorious failure was Seung-Hui Cho, the mentally ill Virginia Tech student who murdered 32 people and wounded 25 others during a daylong rampage in 2007. Cho’s high school did not alert Virginia Tech to Cho’s violent behavior, professors were barred from conferring with one another about Cho, and the university did not inform Cho’s parents about their son’s troubles—all on the basis of an excessively expansive interpretation of Ferpa, Mr. Brandon says. He recommends that parents have their child sign a Ferpa release form before heading off to college.

Full disclosure: I have not yet read the book. But the summary above rings true to my sense of the party culture that exists even on campuses that pride themselves on being serious places. It also meshes with my sense of how drugs and alcohol and casual sex circulate outside a given campus’ party scene. There is a lot of private, quiet drinking and drugging that goes on. Hooking up is the new dating scene, and hardly requires a beer-soaked kegger to sustain its momentum. And kids–for they are kids–are really quite on their own with it all, despite the perfunctory safety nets (counseling services, awareness workshops, etc.) that schools may try to put in place.

One strength of the book–if the review is an accurate picture–is that it makes the connection between schools’ abdication of their educational missions and students’ failure to use their college years in a meaningful, intellectually substantive way. And yet, according to Melanie Kirkpatrick’s review, that doesn’t lead to useful analysis of how the problem should be tackled:

There are several omissions in “The Five-Year Party.” One is the role of college trustees, who share the blame for the failure of the institutions over which they have oversight. Mr. Brandon also gives the faculty a pass. It is hard to believe that professors are as powerless or as cowed as they are portrayed here. The book’s chief villains are a new breed of college administrators, whom Mr. Brandon says have more in common with Gordon Gekko than Aristotle.

Oddest of all is Mr. Brandon’s failure to demand that students take responsibility for their conduct. He depicts them as victims of schools that either coddle them or take advantage of them and of a culture that discourages them from growing up. Mr. Brandon estimates that only 10% of the students at party schools are interested in learning. If that is right, colleges will have little incentive to shape up until their customers—students and parents—demand better.

Most schools, if they tackle the party culture at all, tend to do so without a sense of the wider context in which that culture exists. But the wider view Brandon develops makes it clear that cracking down on under twenty-ones–or, as some college presidents have proposed, just lowering the drinking age to eighteen–is not the answer. The answer is an overhauling of the entire academic enterprise, from top to bottom, demanded by parents and students, led by trustees, and done to ensure that their institutions are fulfilling their obligations to educate–not to pretend to educate, or to play at educating–but to actually educate.

I do think that students rise to the occasion when the standards are high and much is demanded of them. If the cool thing on campus is to be serious and to study, then that is what students will do. And professors can play a very important role in encouraging that. They can each ensure that their own classroom is a place where effort, application, hard work, questioning, and intellectual achievement are valued–and where headgames and nonsense and silliness have no place. They can make it clear that the grades they give are real and must be earned. And they can make it clear that this is where the fun lies in college–that learning is the party.