Take it from a criminal justice major who ended up going into student loan debt because I felt like I just downright “needed” to get it from a university. NOTE, I’m not saying don’t go to college, I’m saying unless you are majoring in one of the fields I named, you’d be better off enrolling at a JUCO or Community College. Now if you have a scholarship then that’s a different story. I was originally in a community college but ended up transferring because that school only offered associate degrees (my other excuse for leaving lol). College as a whole is way too fucking expensive to begin with but I feel as though it would be more worth it if you were in the majors I mentioned. I do realize that there are many graduates who have majored in other fields and feel content and that’s great.
Even some of the stuff you mentioned, such as MBTI (personality “types”), Freud’s theories, Maslow’s hierarchy, and behaviourism are discredited. My point about the TED talk pop psych stuff being discredited though was not to say the general public has rejected these theories. They haven’t. It’s that science has moved on but the public lags behind.
Notice that I never said (throughout this discussion) that the general public is skeptical of psychology. The general public tends to lack the tools of critical thinking needed for healthy skepticism in general (not just in regards to psychology). Saying something is discredited is only saying that science has moved on, not the general public (which even continues to believe in silly things like astrology that have been discredited for centuries).
However, that is not to say the public is totally clueless. While they lack proper critical thinking skills, they do have the ability to become aware of when scientists’ reputations are damaged. This is a far more diffuse effect because the public isn’t generally aware of the differences between individual scientists and their debates within a field. And that’s where the really big problem exists:
An individual scientist can become popular communicating their theory to the public. But when their theory is later discredited the reputational damage can affect the field or even all of science as a whole. Over time this can lead to popular anti-intellectualism, such as we see with climate change denial.