Long has it been known that standardized education mostly exists to provide a uniform experience to better mold a disparate populace into a uniform workforce. Over the past 50 years that workforce has come to require a four-year degree; as a consequence the uniformity of experience has extended to college.

I dunno, man. I spent a year amongst the proletariat teens of This Modern America and fuckin' hell the amount of handholding was just appalling. People with translators following them around. People with state-mandated guidance counselors following them around. People with ADHD headbands. We've agreed as a culture that everyone gets college, we've agreed that we're all fucked without college degrees, so we've agreed as a culture that we'll do whatever it takes to get people through 180 credits come hell or high water and the whole stupid artifice is a sham.

There was a time when bright, capable individuals could find something useful to do without writing 15 essays on Dickens but that time has largely passed. As a consequence we've created a patently preposterous structure to get people over the hump of education they never needed in the first place.