That part of my comment was addressing the idea that school prepares 18-22-year-olds for the real world. I think the real world prepares them a lot faster.

School is one of the few times when it's okay to just learn without also producing something of value. What I chose to learn was computer science and some math and physics. In grad school, I've learned a lot about high performance systems. While this knowledge and related skills are highly valued in the real world, very few real work entities would be willing to pay me to acquire it.

It's tough to learn this stuff on the side. You really need to devote years to learning to be useful. During that time, you're not producing much of value to the outside world. My PhD dissertation will not represent six years of effort; more like one or two. But it took four years of learning to be in the position that I could do that level of work in a year or two.

If you take a CS undergrad, some company somewhere can probably get use of them at their current skill level. But that company will have little interest in paying them to continue learning.

Regarding what you put out versus what you put in, that's true of everything.

That is so weird to me. When I was in school, I spent about eight hours a day, five days a week learning stuff that had little practical application. And now that I work, I spend, oh, six hours a day seven days a week learning stuff with little practical application. Bizarrely, the fact that I'm neither paid nor graded for learning has not stopped me.

Maybe school is good for people who are unable to learn without those incentives, but I'm not sure how much of the population shares that problem. After all, for schools to have something useless to teach, they needed someone to get the ball rolling by learning that stuff before schools existed. So it's been possible in the past.

School is the only time we're allowed to learn without also producing something. You can learn on the job, but there's an expectation that you will produce something as well. They're not paying you to learn for your sake, they're paying you to learn so you can produce something for them. This does not exist in school; everything you produce is only for pedagogical purposes.

I don't know why you brought up incentives; my point has nothing to do with them. My point has to do with time and money. Since you produce nothing of value in school, no one will pay you for it. So you're deferring income so that you can devote all of your time to learning - school is an investment.

If you somehow have a job where you are allowed to do anything you want and produce nothing, then I'd like to know who you work for.