I try to be patient with many younger people. The old saw “If you a young person and aren’t a liberal, you have no heart...if you are an older person and you aren’t conservative, you have no brain” does have some validity.
My whole life I was as conservative as a kid could be. I remember the 1968 election and being completely on board for Richard Nixon (okay, I know he is no conservative, but...you get the idea)
But even still...I DO remember as a college student (and this was after I served four years in the navy) taking a sociology course, and thinking it was the most amazing thing, gushing over a book like “Walden II” (those of you who may have read it will know EXACTLY what I mean)
It was only a few years later, I came to realize it was all liberal, socialist, statist claptrap. But I was caught up in it, me who had traveled around the world by age 21, a conservative, etc.
What you said in your paragraph about holding a job is so true.
I think that colleges would do a much poorer job of liberal indoctrination if high school grads took a dead end job for a year between high school and college, or a stint in the armed forces.
So much of what college peddles is clearly nonsense, if you have even a bit or real world experience.
I had a similar experience. I was born and raised a conservative but I got very involved in public interest law in law school. However, I approached it from a “teach a man to fish” perspective whereas the vast majority of my colleagues approached it from a “give a man a fish” perspective.
I should have pursued it further, I would have made an excellent mole!!