That's the secret of higher education! Forget about the coursework, forget about the social aspect, forget about exposure to ideas. The actual value of universities is that you keep kids busy during the time when they are potentially destructive, and when they pop out they are now magically older and can handle some basic adulthood-on-training-wheels expectations.
And yet a few hundred years ago we had 14-year-olds in the mines of Cornwall supporting whole families.
