It's a bit of an interesting Chesterton's fence. For most of human history your job is whatever your dad's job was (with a large degree of hand waving). It makes sense because there's at least some genetic disposition there and you're likely willing to train your children for free. Instead we pay strangers massive amounts of money for make work training that is often only loosely related to productive skills.

Obviously a lot of reasons to do it this way. But you gotta think at some point not working for 4 years while paying ~2x median annual wage has gotta go the way of the dodo.