I’m sorry, but this is a really ignorant and arrogant position. People of faith have not failed to develop critical thinking skills. Most religions, and certainly all the major world faiths, have very strong traditions of thinking critically about their own faith. Judaism is particularly famous for that.
And if we look at secular belief systems, such as the recently developed gender ideology, which is a confused and contradictory belief, even on its own terms, which has no basis in evidence, rationality or science, and where even the academic proponents of it cannot define its key terms and concepts, and yet this ideology is promoted by highly educated people, including people who call themselves humanists and, more laughably, skeptics. So no, your premise that highly educated people are less likely to hold unevidenced beliefs is entirely bogus.
All that has happened is that religious beliefs have fallen out of vogue for a section of educated people to whom being ‘highly educated’ is part of their internal self-identity. However other unevidenced beliefs are in fashion for them, such as gender ideology, and they hold these beliefs uncritically.
My personal view is that this can be explained through the best explanation I have heard for the formation of religious belief. Which is that it formed as human societies moved to larger communities, not longer just based around family bonds. This required a set of overarching beliefs to hold these communities together. You see the same thing happening with secular belief systems. They hold people together in a social bond of belonging. The function of social bonding, thanks to the shared belief, is more important than a hard evidence base justifying the belief. It’s the function of the belief that is important, not the evidence for it.
At least religious are more honest about that. They are open about being based on faith, on belief. I have more respect for that than secular systems of belief which make claims to objective truth they cannot defend with evidence.