Tangential: I don't believe college teaches critical thinking, because many students would be quitting college once they realized they were receiving a horrible deal (no evidence completing the degree would increase chances of getting the job).
People say college (esp. liberal arts) teaches critical thinking, but in my experience, succeeding in liberal arts classes is about going to office hours and figuring out what the professor wants to hear in your essay.
Related: My friend - smartest I've ever known - wasn't a great writer, but got a perfect score on the SAT writing section by memorizing the SAT word list and making an absolutely incomprehensible essay where almost every word was a bastardized thesaurus word for what word should have been used (and many just didn't make sense at all). Undoubtedly, it was a bad essay. But simply because they couldn't read it and it sounded smart, they awarded him the perfect score.