College also increasingly ties in industry experience with in-class experience as companies are only willing to take on interns that are currently studying at colleges they're partnered with. Not to mention the way people use it as a networking opportunity and a chance to try out new things before having to dedicate themselves to a career they might despise.

Democracies depend on voters who are lucid, informed and rational. Modern technological civilization provides so much, and in very abstract ways, that it is non-optional that people be able to understand, or know they don't understand, massive swathes of broad-reaching ideas and concepts. Because democracies say "choose a candidate to represent you on all these things".

And you genuinely believe modern colleges provide this?

To the extent that viewpoints not part of the accepted doctrine are presented, they are presented poorly and without passion.

I think that’s exactly right. Reading primary sources is much more complicated than reading undergrad-level sources: you need to read not just the source, but enough supporting material to understand the context the source was writing in, competing movements and how they were viewed at the time, etc. You simply don’t have time in a one-semester course on, say, political thought in the 19th century, to dive into the details of any one particular movement, be it abolitionism, women’s suffrage, or anything else. The scope of these questions is enormous, and whatever primary sources a student is likely to find will have tremendous selection bias, because the student won’t even know what sources they’re ignoring or what context they might be missing.

Part of the professor’s job in undergraduate courses is to give the lay of the land. And if an enterprising student decides to put in the primary source work, to not let that one student derail the conversation into hyperfocusing on a single topic, while hopefully also preventing the student from getting hopelessly lost.

Or George Mason U's Mercatus Institute, headed by Tyler Cohen -- one of the larger investments in schools made by the Koch Bros. There are lots of others.

The academic bubble has grown and shifted over the years, this is evident to most people i know who can peek outside their academic circles. Academia is slowly moving itself to irrelevance

...depending on both the student and the career.

Many tech jobs require not much more than literacy, 6th grade algebra, and a tiny bit of grit. Most smart middle schoolers could make mid five figures slinging PHP part time. I did in early high school, and I'm not particularly smart or hard working.

But there are many jobs, even in relatively easy fields like programming, where nonnegative productivity requires years of practice.

Not mine. Went to two Universities - both taught students to regurgitate what lecturers taught. Anything beyond that meant low marks.