A new approach to the Socratic method, where we don't always know the answer at the end, but have collected some useful tools or models along the way.
If we're looking for bright sides, there are parts of education/public debate which have been merely about stringing words together and mastering a discourse. This can be made more irrelevant by being indistinguishable from ravings of a generative model. Remember that even something like literary studies is supposed to be about themes, ideas and parts of human experience reflected in art, history of intellectual formations and stylistic techniques etc.
I was gonna say, knowing educated people I doubt any of this makes you wiser by itself. This would disprove the 'prepare for life' bit of the OP. But thinking about it, the most ridiculous scams and traps in life aren't generally targeted at people who've read Milton, Moliere etc. So maybe there's something about exercising your mind about human condition, and thought and experience accumulated by mankind, that I'm not appreciating enough. It does allow you to have a wider language to speak and listen, more dimensions to understand things in, and experience life.