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I remember watching public-interest TV ads extolling the benefits of college and, at least implicitly, warning that a high school diploma was no longer a ticket to success.

A generation earlier, higher education was so deeply valued that Congress passed a law, the GI Bill, to reward military veterans with low-cost or even free college tuition, affordable home mortgages and other benefits.

Today, attending college faces strong headwinds. Costs skyrocketed — to at least $25,000 a year at public universities and four times as much at coveted private schools. Despite these costs, it is more challenging to gain acceptance to better colleges because of Baby Boomer parents pushing their kids to get ahead. We also have a president who accuses professors of liberal “indoctrination� and cuts funding for academic research.

Some young people, especially men, are delaying or eschewing college. Female university students increasingly outnumber male students.

Colleges have experienced tumult before. In the Red Scare of the 1950s, students faced accusations, often unfounded, of being communists. A decade later, Vietnam War protests rocked campuses and sometimes turned violent.

But the hyper-competitiveness of college today is new. Though I edited my high-school newspaper and earned national writing awards in a fine suburban Detroit public education system, my B-plus grade average never would have been good enough today to get me into my alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley.

As an academic tutor who sometimes helps high schoolers complete their college applications, I am stunned by how cutthroat applying to college has become. The University of Virginia, near where I live, is one of the country’s best public schools, but still a notch or two below the Ivies and other private universities such as Duke, Stanford and MIT. Yet I have seen stellar students with extraordinary extracurricular activities and community service, even those with 4.1 or 4.2 (above A) grade-point averages, get rejected by Virginia.

As for President Donald Trump’s indoctrination claim, it is true that many professors, especially at the elite schools, are liberal. That is what I hear almost uniformly when folks learn that I attended Berkeley, with its reputation as the cradle of the 1960s student movement. Far less known, however, is that it was a breeding ground for spies where professors  agents for the CIA.

The greatest professors make college worthwhile. I still remember the thrilling lectures and thought-provoking seminars of Karen Hermassi, a young political-theory professor who taught a course on Plato. She pushed back against the then-prevailing academic view of the ancient Greek philosopher as an ideological harbinger for 20th-century dictators from Hitler to Mussolini. 

While I came to disagree with her, her inspiring lectures helped teach me invaluable lessons about challenging accepted wisdom and reading even dense texts closely. And they taught me another lesson: However abstract it seems at the time, what you learn in college might prove more relevant than you ever imagine. Our debates over Plato and totalitarianism seemed distant from the America I’d grown up in. But today, in the America of Trump, no debate is more vital.

That vitality has given attending college a new mission: to help save American democracy. With some of the world’s finest universities under attack from their own government, it is no longer enough to gain an education. Young learners must model the critical role of higher education in the self-governance our Founders sought. And they must demonstrate to their countrymen that the free exchange of ideas will help us preserve our government of self-rule.