Hirsch is a case study of a phenomenon that wouldn’t have made sense even to Ronald Reagan in 1966: the saturation of higher education with market thinking. It cuts against the presumption that the campus should be a place radically apart from the rest of society — its own “city-state,” as the British poet Stephen Spender wrote in a 1968 essay entirely typical of the era’s what’s-happening-on-campus genre. A biology major, Hirsch is most passionate about biotechnology. His ambition is to work for a venture-capital firm. He became excited telling me about the summer job he had at the University of Chicago’s Office of Technology and Intellectual Property and about sitting on a committee to help set up a university “biotech incubator, where a new biotechnology company can be started up.” He also expresses disappointment in Chicago’s relative lack of market mojo: “Stanford commercializes a lot of stuff very well. This university has a lot of stuff that would be great, but we don’t act on it.” I asked whether incentivizing science according to its marketability might distort the university’s mission to nurture ideas on the basis of intellectual merit, regardless of commercial potential. He’s a bright kid, but I’m not sure he understood the question.

Just before these interviews, there had been a wave of campus activism: Chicago was considering replacing its idiosyncratic Uncommon Application in favor of the so-called Common Application used by many top-tier schools. “I love the Uncommon Application,” Hirsch said. Then he added, “But at the same time I want the value of my degree to go up.” One thing that the U.S. News & World Report rankings measure, he explained, is “selectivity,” and the Uncommon Application (goes the theory) kills Chicago’s selectivity rate by keeping more people from applying. Interestingly enough, when I later spoke to a pro-Uncommon Application advocate, his argument for it was likewise couched in economic terms.

I brought up another goal of campus activists to Jonathan Hirsch: reversing Chicago’s decision, unusual among top-tier universities, not to divest from the military government of Sudan in protest against the genocide in Darfur. He responded: “I understand their whole position. But, well, I’m not going to intrude myself on the investment decisions of the university.” He then began a sophisticated critique of the marginal utility limited, he says of the divestment strategy as politics. When I later presented his arguments to a group of Darfur activists, they laid out their own position in market language: “In terms of the prevailing trend in corporate social responsibility, as a large corporation, albeit a university, we want our university to remain competitive in that respect.”

There is something that these very different students share. Just as the distance between the campus and the market has shrunk (perhaps not that surprising at Chicago, home of the market-based approach to almost everything), so has the gap between childhood and college and between college and the real world that follows. To me, to Doug Mitchell, to just about anyone over 30, going to college represented a break, sometimes a radical one and our immediate postcollege lives represented a radical break with college. Some of us ended up coming back to the neighborhood partly for that very fact: nostalgia for four years unlike any we had experienced or would experience again. Not for these kids.

Hamilton Morris, with his hip, creative parents, is an extreme case of a common phenomenon: college without the generation gap. (As I write this at a coffee shop near campus, a kid picks up her cellphone — “Hi, Dad!” — and chats amiably for 15 minutes. “When we went to college,” a dean of students who was a freshman in 1971 tells me, “you called on Sunday — the obligatory 30-second phone call on the dorm phone — and you hoped not to hear from them for the rest of the week.”)