April is a nail-biting period for high school seniors eager to learn where they have been accepted to pursue a college education. Parents scour mailboxes and e-mails for the anxiety-laden teens.

In the end, of course, everyone will gain admission somewhere since, as America advertises, we have a college for everyone.

What we don’t have is a space for all the applicants to elite institutions, those ivy colleges dripping with tradition and influence.

Arguably the most influential is Yale, former home to the Clintons and the Bushes, among other notables. According to Newsweek, Yale may receive more applications for available spots than any other college in the nation.

With that in mind, I was intrigued when perusing library stacks recently, I came across the 1894 Yale College prospectus of elective courses. The find also brought to mind a meeting I had with a group of Yale students last spring, who were extolling their university’s range of courses. So, I undertook to compare the old prospectus with the 2006-7 Yale College program of study.

In doing so, I couldn’t help but be struck by the dramatic change that has occurred in 113 years. Moreover, if evolution infers progress, there is something fundamentally wrong with this comparison.

The 1894 catalog is 50 pages long. Each course is described succinctly, e.g., “The History of Europe since 1789” or “The Phaedo of Plato.” Literature courses are simply named after a playwright, author, or poet such as “Shakespeare” and “Browning.”

The introduction merely indicates how many courses must be selected. A statement of aims doesn’t appear. Course descriptions when they exist are brief and very much to the point. For example, in “Latin Philology” “such features of the language are studied as its historical development and decay, relations to other languages, forms and syntax, pronunciation, adaptation to literature, etc.”

Courses associated with biblical literature are prominently mentioned, but all of what we now call the liberal arts and science are included.

By contrast the present catalog is 620 pages. Some of that additional content can be attributed to relatively recent developments in the sciences such as neurolinguistics and computer science. While many traditional courses are retained, the college has clearly embraced the concerns of the Zeitgeist. For example, in the women’s gender and sexuality program, one can find courses such as “U.S. Lesbian and Gay History,” “White Masculinity and Sexuality in U.S. Popular Culture,” “Queer Ethnographics,” and “Introduction to Queer Cinema.”

At the beginning of the catalog, Yale officials state their purpose: “Yale College offers a liberal arts education, one that aims to train a broadly based, highly disciplined intellect without specifying in advance how that intellect will be used.” The goal is “exploration,” stimulating curiosity, and discovering new interests.

These platitudinous claims stand in stark contrast to the simple educational goals implied in the 1894 catalog. Presumably the 620 pages in the modern catalog, 12 times the size of the 1894 document, are needed to enhance the exploration. The good, the bad, and the ugly must be explored along with the trivial, the fashionable, and the puerile.

In a real sense, the college education of fewer course offerings had a more solid foundation than its modern counterpart. After all, 620 pages of courses can only confuse the teenage mind. How does one separate the wheat from the chaff? The modern catalog also suggests that the faculty has either lost a sense of what a liberal education ought to be or it has been coerced into the “Chinese menu” of educational selection, i.e., so many from column A and column B.

For me, less is more. A course simply devoted to Plato has more to offer than one called “Plato’s Philosophical Psychology.” In an effort to satisfy the yearning of professors who seek courses in areas narrowly defined, e.g., “Music, Law and Sexual Desire in Medieval Europe,” the administration has lost control of the curriculum.

Rather than promote a vision of the academy, professors have abdicated responsibility through choices of every variety, a veritable bouquet of experiences. If you cannot find what you are looking for in the extraordinary course list, you can always engage in that old standby, independent study. You can determine what you want to learn without paying much attention to the guidance of an instructor.

Six hundred and twenty pages of courses reduce to fatuity the notion of a central “core” or what it is a student ought to know. At the moment, a student decides what he should know from a vast reservoir of courses.

Is this the way to manage a university? My guess is that Cardinal Newman, author of the classic “The Idea of a University,” wouldn’t countenance the present curriculum, nor, for that matter, would those who attended Yale University more than 100 years ago.

Mr. London, president of the Hudson Institute and professor emeritus of New York University, is the author of “Decade of Denial.”