I attended a liberal arts college, and enjoyed the courses that I took in most subjects. I got good grades. I'm still interested in many of the topics gathered under the umbrella of "humanities."
But it strikes me that "humanities students become analytical thinkers" is as much of a meme as "humanities students become baristas," at least in the absence of supporting evidence.
It could be true, and to some extent is anecdotally supported by those among my acquaintances who studied in the humanities, but that could be just a matter of survivor bias. We don't hear from the ones who didn't become analytical thinkers, or we associate them with their terminal degrees, such as MBAs.
I'm writing this just to comment on your use of the word "meme"; it's not intended to be a criticism* but the expression of an observation.
In your fourth sentence, it seems that are using "meme" to specifically denote an idea or statement that is unsupported or unverified. This is not wrong, but I have not seen this particular usage of the word before. It does differ from Dick Dawkins' original meaning: he used "meme" to denote the component in cultural evolution whose role is analogous to that of genes in biological evolution. But I find your use to be an interesting development in the development of "meme" and the memes it signifies†.
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* However, I do believe the conversation has been framed improperly: e.g., the groups "baristas" and "analytical thinkers" do not have mutually exclusive membership, but instead intersect significantly. There exists many an analyst barista who brews Brazilian whilst brooding about Bruegel at Bruegger's Bagels, plenty espresso-synthesists with scholastic emphases on existentialists' expressions of Parisian café culture (dissertation: "Bean & Nothin'ess"), and please don't get me started on those poor doctoral students who must lecture on Melville in the morn then manage a late shift at the mall latte-mill aptly named after Ahab's first mate.
† Indeed, for me, I find to be the memetics of "meme" a remarkably meta matter, and that fact is itself alone the motivation to make my remarks (I must mention, if I may).
Before entering college, I used to think that philosophy majors were just degrees to kill time. I took a philosophy course for a blow-off elective. It was a class on critical thinking. The class was quite challenging and covered topics from James Randi's skepticism, to logical fallacies, and to statistical methods and reasoning. It really made me to what I am today. A skeptic and someone with a career involving statistics.
I sat in on a couple Philosophy of Biology classes on the suggestion of a friend during undergrad. There was an entire series of these courses for chemistry, physics, computation, etc., with a mix of history and philosophy. There's a certain contextualization of a field that the technically oriented study track never seems to cover adequately (or if it does, it's the first paragraph of a chapter that gets quickly skimmed through).
I read a short introduction to the Philosophy of Science, because I figured I must be obviously missing something. The closest the book came to useful was suggesting that biologists have serious fights over the meaning of the word "life", as if that somehow had any bearing on anything.
But it strikes me that "humanities students become analytical thinkers" is as much of a meme as "humanities students become baristas," at least in the absence of supporting evidence.
It could be true, and to some extent is anecdotally supported by those among my acquaintances who studied in the humanities, but that could be just a matter of survivor bias. We don't hear from the ones who didn't become analytical thinkers, or we associate them with their terminal degrees, such as MBAs.