Yeah I don't think college is a like a machine where you put a person in an out pops a leftist.

My point was more that University may make people challenge conventions and start asking questions. But that will have different outcome depending on your background. Maybe you come from a family which is already quite open minded and live in an open minded community.

Or you could be from an environment which is very leftist and where one is dogmatic. In this context challenging conventions could mean going to the right of where you are.

Left-right is of course a gross simplification. Politics is more complex than a single axis in one dimension. The key point is that college can make you question the status quo, but that status quo is not necessarily conservative. E.g. I didn't grow up myself in a conservative family or society, given that I grew up in Norway.

Thus in a Norwegian context I moved to the right in my college years. But it didn't mean I became more close minded. It simply meant I started questioning a number of established truthisms.

Thus when I am remarking on how many Americans go to the left, that is because a large part of the US is quite conservative and thus this is what many will experience. But somebody growing up in an Calefornian hippie family may get a different outcome from college.