College is a massive time and monetary commitment. The reason the vast majority of people go through it is because employment opportunities are gated away behind a degree. Without one, finding the job you want can be extremely difficult, and at times even impossible.

It always bothered me how colleges hold someone's future career hostage like this, forcing them to go through them, and then they pretend it's not the case and that college is simply intellectual enrichment.

The gating that colleges do also makes it much more difficult to change careers than it should be. The whole system does the task it's given extremely poorly, and pretends that it's not even responsible for the task. Great, fine. Let's work on alternative ways to handle job credentialing then.