This has an extremely wide variation between colleges, the vast majority of schools my friends went to did more to beat out original/critical/creative thought t

This has an extremely wide variation between colleges, the vast majority of schools my friends went to did more to beat out original/critical/creative thought then they did to encourage it... the few friends that did get the kind of education you're talking about went to very small (5k or less), very expensive ($40k or more), private, liberal arts schools where they majored in something very specific and had motivated and inspired mentoring professors. It's much harder to find these schools (the Ivy's aren't locks for this kind of education) than people realize; it more or less comes down to a flash of intuition while touring a campus.