The education system is a system of indoctrination of the young. Always has been.
That's useful to you since you can make a somewhat easy living. Useful to society? I mean sort of, in most jobs you achieve _something_. The fact that we're inefficient and often build the wrong thing that's useless is more of a failure of the human race in general..
I live in Europe where university is free or quite cheap so asking young people to do it for a couple years isn't the worst.. it's quite fun. And I say this as someone who dropped out to work in software engineering instead.