Do the humanities output graduates who are better at thinking for themselves? I've read far too many accounts of people plainly stating that they just pretended to spouse an ideology in order to pass a class for me to take such thing as granted.

Anecdotally, yes. The best colleagues I've worked with in the tech industry have been people who quit their history or philosophy PhD programs. In most cases, I would hire classics majors who taught themselves to code over CS majors.

The fact of the matter is that most jobs in most industries do not require virtuoso technical ability, but they do benefit from close reading, attention to detail, a willingness to look at the bigger picture and challenge mistaken assumptions baked into bad specifications.

That just sounds like being smart. I can't see any relation to any of that to studying humanities in school. In fact from my experience in school the humanities classes were much more memorize and repeat back than the STEM ones.

There's a correlation that smart people study things they find interesting. As soon as it became clear that computer science was a money maker, you had a lot of students taking doing CS majors who weren't really interested in anything except making money.

Majoring in anything other than CS, engineering, finance, business, or biology (premed) is a signal for intellectual curiosity. Obviously there are plenty of students with real curiosity in those majors too, but there's also many incurious mercenaries.

But that doesn't put any value on those degrees, just the smart people.

How much of that has to do with humanities vs being self-taught?

+1 to this. Astronomy students also tend to be unexpectedly good at programming.

As a history major turned engineer another thing I noticed is that while pure engineers tend to solve for x really well, people with humanities degrees tend to ask is what we are solving for useful? Definitely need both sides.

Wouldn't there very definition of independant thought be understanding an idiology but not limiting yourself to it?

It's debatable whether critical thinking can be taught sucessfully. In my opinion, the more important question is whether people can think about anything other than work and making money. There's much more to life than that, and as a society we should value much more than just going to work and cashing paychecks.

The fact that the humanities are not profitable is precisely their point.

You can't have half your population attempting academic degrees. When too many people attend university they become trade schools.