In my experience, the people that latch onto self help gurus, preachers of weird beliefs, and peddlers of odd lifestyles, are usually graduates of college. They were taught to be skeptics by how education is done now. So they reject traditional things and yearn for yogis and the like.
Part of the purpose of teaching philosophy is you get rigour from actually testing those ideas out in a place where people are going to scrutinise the ideas. That’s why philosophy exists, and history, and a whole load of other humanities subjects.