The upshot is that instead of a broadly-educated citizenry trained in careful thinking, we have a class of vocationally trained workers with a sense of entitlement to be treated as an intellectual elite. In other words, our universities are amplifying the Dunning-Kruger Effect, the notion that people generally believe they are smarter than they are, that our confidence routinely outstrips our competence, and that people of low achievement have the highest confidence in themselves. College education has elevated Dunning-Kruger from a quirky finding about the low end of the achievement spectrum into a generalized description of American culture. It turns out none of us are terribly well-educated, and we are all more confident than our actual competence merits.

That may explain a lot about our information environment: why people argue on Facebook and Twitter with amazing levels of confidence, why culturally illiterate pundits get paid for shockingly shallow and ignorant talking points, why people with no expertise argue with trained professionals after reading one article on the internet. A third of Americans have just enough higher education to believe their opinions should carry authority with little of the wisdom, critical thinking, or humility that a real education is supposed to germinate.