If you take someone with conservative values and you give them a quality education, they become a moderate. If you take someone with progressive values and give them an education they become a socialist very liberal. If you give someone with moderate values an education, they become an MBA. Education selects against conservatives because conservative politics come from ignorance and magical thinking.
i think with conservatives it's more the case that they learn how to say particular words to fit in better with certain lib crowds than necessarily become moderates. College teaches them how to sound like moderates.
they go from conservatives to bow-tie conservatives
A corollary to this is how Evangelical parents think college “brainwashes” their kids and turns them into atheists. The reality is, they spend 18 years feeding their kids magical bullshit about how evolution isn’t true, the earth is 6,000 years old, the OT is real history, and how the Bible is entirely free from error. Not to mention telling them all those scary LGBTQ people are all just evil sinners.
They spend 18 years building this little bubble of religious ideas around their kids - making sure their kids only associate with church kids, sending them to private Christian schools, etc. But since those ideas are such ridiculous horseshit, they don’t bear even the slightest scrutiny, and college is the first time for a lot of these kids that their beliefs face any scrutiny at all. True for notions of biblical historicity as much as actually meeting people of different religions, sexual orientations, etc, often for the first time in their lives in any meaningful sense. So they abandon their beliefs and often resent their religious parents for how they were raised.