Just out of curiosity, where does your experience with "non-STEM university and grad settings" come from that you are judging and contrasting it so harshly with STEM?

Seems like you've been in higher level STEM settings and your experience outside of that has been low level electives, you've had limited and unusually poor samples, or you're just speaking out of bias for (presumably) your own path in life.

I don't think people who are not "STEM" are generally going around navigating the world and school like uninformed, idiot freshman who don't know how to participate in their own education... At least not any more then people in STEM are ;-)