Recently, Charles Murray and others have argued that too many people go to college. If enough parents read Donna Freitas's fascinating, flawed, and provocative new book, that problem will solve itself.

Freitas takes an in-depth look at the sexual and spiritual cultures of seven colleges-two Catholic, two evangelical, and three nonreligious-and paints a picture that should disturb even the most complacent chancellor or alumnus donor.

Freitas grouped the nonreligious and Catholic schools together as "spiritual" schools, because no religious ethos pervades or even chastens their students in the sexual realm. These are the schools of "hookup culture," where oral sex is less intimate than handholding and undergraduate women attend theme parties in which, no matter whether the men are "CEOs" or "Sports Pros," the coeds are always some variation of "ho." And interestingly, these are the schools where very bright students become incoherent or clichéd when asked to describe how their spirituality and their sexuality interact.

But Freitas doesn't spare the evangelical schools, either. She delineates the gossip culture common to both evangelical and "spiritual" schools-even though, for the evangelicals, such gossip ought to be as sinful as premarital sex. She gives poignant examples of the anxieties and confusion caused by the evangelical colleges' "senior scramble" for (in what's become a campus proverb) "ring by spring or your money back!"