It isn’t a mcburger. It’s an investment with an excepted variable return realized over like 4-5 decades. There’s almost nothing else an 18-22 can do that has comparable odds of increasing value of oneself in dollar terms and in impossible-to-measure-society terms than getting accepted into a good school.

(E.g. you hear about college dropouts starting businesses all the time. You barely ever hear that about people who haven’t attended college at all.)