This.

The humanities are glossed over at best in public high schools across the United States. I don't know of one that requires a PHIL intro course of students.

College is not vocational training (unless you're a law or medicine student), it's for learning how to think.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'teach the basics'. Certainly, college can provide the texts and an environment where other people are interested in the same subjects. If that's all you mean I agree, though it's far from the only institution where that's possible.

The trouble, I think, is that making ethical judgements requires wrestling with ethical conundra oneself, and that is not something a professor with 300 undergrads to teach can provide any useful guidance to the majority of them for. The idea of accurately assessing performance is even more unrealistic. Maybe it's a function of the kind of university I attended, but the vast majority of my fellow students who were taking these 'subjective' courses were simply gaming a rubric in their writing. And this is true even of those who were genuinely interested in the subject matter, they saw it as a price of admission.

Which seems to me like an impediment to actually learning what was traditionally taught on more of an apprenticeship than an industrial model. If your own undergraduate experience was different, I'd be curious what your university did differently.

Do you really think new college students absorb all that they hear in the entry-level classes? You're also operating under the assumption that all professors employed by a college are capable of effectively communicating the topic they're supposed to teach

I agree. Developed is one thing, even building a space where it's easier to develop, but teaching? As a guy who's taught for both fun and profit, I don't buy it.