Most colleges have done the opposite in recent years. They provide echo-chambers for emotionally-fueled pseudoscience.
I've seen this while spending time at Boston University, Harvard, Brown, and Columbia. It's frightening how little people are able to think or question anything once they've gone through the college system. They become frightened by and angry at truths that don't align with the narrative they've been taught.
I've spoken to dozens of people who've gone through the wringer and come out the other side realizing how detrimental college was to themselves and their peers intellectually.
What is the nature of this pseudo-science?
I believe it really stems from a belief that they are collectively special — that they're wiser, more moral, and more 'perfect' than their ancestors, their less-educated fellow citizens, and so on. They encourage people to become 'educated' on issues that they themselves aren't particularly educated in, aside from reading Instagram graphics. They seek to 'cancel' people who present other world views.
While most people I know have been through all that and eventually come to a place of humility after college, easily half of the students never did. They continue on, unfazed, with a radical belief in their own moral superiority.
I'm sorry for the length and vagueness of this — it's really incredibly hard to describe as it's so pervasive throughout everything, and generally it's something people only understand after going through the system. You've got me thinking of how to articulate it better!
I said that colleges are teaching the opposite of critical thinking, not that critical thinking was detrimental intellectually.
> considering they decided to attend a university.
They attended university because almost all came from an upper-middle-class background where there is no viable alternative according to their families. If you think they decided to attend university, you're speaking of different types of people — the only decision for them is which college to attend.
Resource constraints basically, and the removal of the degree from free market mechanics. I.e. guaranteed loans, not being able to discharge upon bankruptcy, etc.
You also don't need to go to college to get an education in what are historically liberal arts subjects (history, etc.) and in-person classroom lectures for those topics really should be few and far between and extremely academic.
I probably remember or know as much about history as a random undergrad history major does just because I read a lot and you can't remember everything.
Most of those classes aren't worth a lot of money. In fact you can take pretty much any class you would want to for free with open lectures too. I'd also argue that most liberal arts courses don't teach students how to think critically as a broad skillset. Usually the professor just has a narrative or point of view that they want to push and you can't really write contrary to that without an inordinate amount of research which begs the question "why bother?" when the whole point of being there is to get a degree with good grades to get a job. The whole cycle is screwed up.
I'd also say besides some class signaling stuff I can't really tell the difference between university graduates and non-graduates. Work output is the same in my experience.
Is this a thing only in the US? I went to university in Europe and there were 0 subjects that were unrelated to the (STEM) degree I chose. It was all 100% technical stuff.
Given the fact that the STEM subjects most in use by the HN crowd are the easiest to learn on your own I find it fascinating when people start bragging about all of the educational opportunities they avoided.
For my math degree, I also had requirements in: psychology, philosophy, religion, science, writing, and foreign language.
Which is why both sides either denigrate college or treat it as some sort of tech jobs training.
(My highlight)
I wish that were true, but it isn't always the case.
My counter-example is my ex-colleague who started her science PhD at the same time as me in the same research group as me waaaay back in the late 1990s.
Long and short of it, we each did our 3-ish years in the lab, she wrote up her thesis, I wrote up my thesis, we each had our oral exam around the same time. Her writing (her words) was "torn to shreds", she ended up back in the lab for several months doing more work and some serious rewriting, I got away with only a handful of typos to fix.
I blame our supervisor for this, but that's another story.
EDIT: (Follow-up Q) who exactly is supposed to be teaching critical thinking?
Post-secondary education, regardless of the specific major a student chooses, does provide a significant benefit to society: especially in the early years, it teaches students how to think critically. Perhaps this skill could be taught earlier during secondary education, but at least in the U.S., it is not. And this skill is incredibly important for becoming an informed member of the electorate who can separate truth from bullshit.