That's a nice way of looking at it, and I'm not going to argue against it per se, but a cynical part of me thinks there's simply more money to be made by pushing loans on young adults and then using them in the workforce.

US student loan debt is somewhere around $1.4 trillion. For comparison, mortgage debt is somewhere around $8.9 trillion. That's a pretty damn big market. [0][1]

If that education was free, I'd wholly agree with you that it's simply our society deciding this is for the betterment of all. But when you combine these two sources of debt (student loans so we can get jobs that afford us home mortgages) then we're looking at a new, weird, first-world form of debt bondage. [2]

Again, I realize that's a very pessimistic point of view. Will be interesting to see how the history books view it in years to come.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_debt#/media/File:Stude... [1]: https://www.marketplace.org/2018/02/13/economy/divided-decad... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_bondage

This applies to young adults; not children. You're not wrong, but you are slightly off topic.

You’re not alone in thinking this.

That's a better way to put it; we've decided that humans' lifetime productivity is usually maximized by putting off the requirement that they be productive until later in their lives.