In Beyond the Limits of Neoliberal Higher Education: Global Youth Resistance and the American/British Divide Henry A. Giroux says that under neo-liberalism the culture of critical thinking has been slowly disappearing on U.S. campuses. The corporate university means that:

The corporatization of schooling and the commodification of knowledge over the last few decades has done more than make universities into adjuncts of corporate power. It has produced a culture of critical illiteracy and further undermined the conditions necessary to enable students to become truly engaged, political agents. The value of knowledge is now linked to a crude instrumentalism, and the only mode of education that seems to matter is that which enthusiastically endorses learning marketable skills, embracing a survival-of-the-fittest ethic, and defining the good life solely through accumulation and disposal of the latest consumer goods. Academic knowledge has been stripped of its value as a social good. To be relevant, and therefore adequately funded, knowledge has to justify itself in market terms, or simply perish.

In a social order dominated by the relentless privatizing and commodification of everyday life and the elimination of critical public spheres, young people find themselves in a society in which the formative cultures necessary for a democracy to exist have been more or less eliminated, or reduced to spectacles of consumerism made palatable through a daily diet of game shows, reality TV, and celebrity culture.