Efforts to develop critical thinking falter in practice because too many professors still lecture to passive audiences instead of challenging students to apply what they have learned to new questions.
I don't think the alternative to Yale is jail by any means. On the other hand, there is a mass of research that does show that there are real advantages to your subsequent career in going to selective institutions.
I suspect that no community will become humane and caring by restricting what its members can say.
The vast majority of students probably emerge from college with an adequate grasp of no more than a single method of inquiry. Even this capacity may erode over time if it does not relate to experiences and problems that recur in the student's later life.
I think one thing that does cause unhappiness is protracted anxiety and worry.
Once you start worrying about a national football championship, then you begin to worry about getting the quality of athlete, and the numbers needed, to win a national championship. And that worry leads to pressure to compromise academic standards to admit those athletes.
