> In an ideal world that's true, but a lot of really bright kids wind up becoming educationally restless, and fall into traps of not seeking higher education because of how slow it is.
in our real world, most of the people making cutting edge breakthroughs in math and science were gifted kids who got a great education through graduate school.
True though some ended up underemployed as patent clerks along their journey to the cutting edge. In an ideal world, those years would have never been "lost".
Thankfully there are some programs now where kids like that can still thrive under a job+degree hybrid (and no I don't mean that one co-op semester). The work gives them real experience and a faster pace, the degree secures a stable foundation to provide that work context. So maybe when OP is of age the programs will be less limited and accept more students.