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I think your distinction of 'critical thinking' versus 'rigor' is more important than a 'slight' confounder. Which is to say- I think you could be even more right than you realize.
I can fully get on board with arguments that universities have, in fact, lowered rigorous standards and this is a bad thing. I'd even consider systemic contributions for this, ranging from the commercialization of higher education (students are customers, as opposed to wards), to political preference systems (we can't let [X] do worse than [Y]). The economic incentives to, say, not fail the rich-sons of benefactors has changed to different 'we may/may not relax standards.' The cluster of distinctions can support that. If you relax standards in one way, that can lead to also relaxing standards in another. Rigor and critical thinking do correlate.
But- and an important distinction of clusters- they are not the same thing. Working hard, working diligently, and working smartly are three different things. Critical thinking and rigorous thinking are not the same either. They more correlate, but they don't have to. More importantly, they aren't causal.
They also may have ambiguous / shifting definitions.
Take your point on 'maximum' point in the past. Is the maximum the [% pure critical thinking] of the students, a ratio? Or is the maximum measured by [#critical thinking] = [% PCT]x[# of students], a volume?
In the former, the downgrading of standards lowers critical thinking. Each student is less pure/capable at critical thinking as part of the correlation 'all boats decrease.' In the later, the downgrading of student standards increases critical thinking. If lower standards allow more students, then more students, even if less capable, provide more critical thinking overall.
And this gets changed by non-stable equilibrium. Universities are constantly changing in composition. Slowly, in the case of professors (usually), but constantly. Even if there is an optimal setup for Maximum Critical Thinking, the very conditions that set it up may lead to it's decline in a natural ebb-and-flow.
Say you need particularly good professors, but the professor dies/retires and gets hired with a cheaper one. University MCT goes down, even if all other things stay constant. Say you need a particular political balance of professors to encourage MCT, to encourage both a healthy consensus but a vibrant and occasionally persuasive minority, but the winners (or losers) of the ratio upset that balance. Say there are temporary MCT buffs if you have something like a politically controversial-but-persuasive movement who increase MCT as a byproduct of their activities to get people to change their mind in critical thinking-compatible ways, but total MCT goes down after the agitators stop convincing people to change positions but instead are enforcing a new status quo.
I think these factors would support a natural ebb-and-flow of critical thinking MCT%, even as it obscures specific contributions (artificial highs) with cluster-visible effects (lower standards lowering the cluster). 'You' (ControlsFreak) are accurately seeing cluster-wide effects at a time of your presence, but cannot see events that happened / were set in progress before your arrival.
But it does suggest both that things could get better in the future, but also that previous/accustomed levels were an aberration reverting to a historical norm, as opposed to a sustainable new norm.
Fair enough. Though I think that as we move in the direction of stronger versions of the divide between rigor and critical thinking, I find myself thinking that it is unlikely that I am going to have access to any sort of measurement or indicator of the level of critical thinking. I think my previous comment could be interpreted as having an implicit, "I don't know how to measure/assess critical thinking, directly, so if I'm going to have any hope at coming to a view on this issue, I'm probably going to have to rely on the best proxy I can come up with that I have been able to access." And thus, the more we move toward thinking that rigor is just not a good proxy, the more I move toward thinking that critical thinking is just currently unobservable.
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