Have you visited any college campuses lately? The percentage of students whose primary purpose for being there is very, very small. The amount of time and energy they devote to wild partying, hollering mindlessly at ball games, and promoting nutty political causes which they're far too naive to assess, is staggering. All at a tab of around $30,000 per student per year, to whoever's paying. Many if not most will eventually regret not having used their one opportunity for education more productively, but by the time they're serious about studying, the money's all been spent and nobody's offering them a free ride anymore.
I worked full time for 4 years between high school and college, for a fast food chain, starting as counter help and eventually becoming a shift manager, responsible for hiring, training, disciplining, and firing high school and college age kids, making sure my shifts met financial targets in both sales and expenses, and enforcing security procedures (on night shifts in an area where most stores in the chain had been held up at least once, including a mass murder at one; and with typical stupid kids for employees, who would do things like stash alcoholic beverages by the dumpster, and then try to head back there during or after closing work -- nah, no criminal would take that opportunity to put a gun to a kid's head to gain entry to the closed store and force the manager to empty the safe and rape her afterwards, as happened to one of my fellow shift managers nearby).
That was a whole lot more valuable than going to some college and squeezing in a little real studying around a jammed schedule of social and extracurricular activities, and undergoing freshman indoctrination (I was pretty indoctrination-proof by the time I got to college). And frankly, I would have benefitted from a couple more years in the work world before moving on to college and then law school, and would have done that if my parents hadn't been endlessly pressuring me to go to college (I lived with my mother during most of that time, paying half the mortgage, all my own expenses, and my own health insurance).
I'm not unique. I know the older students at my college were much more serious about their educations, and I've taken some science courses at an urban college recently, and seen a huge difference in attitudes towards academics, between straight-from-high-school students, and those who are either attending part time while supporting themselves with full time work, or attending full time after several years in the working world. In general, a dollar spent on college education for someone who's already been self-supporting for a few years, gets a whole lot more return than a dollar spent on college education for a kid straight out of high school. Certainly, a small percentage of high school students are mature and serious about academic work, and ready to take full advantage of a college education, but even those would usually benefit from a year or two out in the real world.
The reason it's so easy for colleges to brainwash young adults with ludicrous political and economic ideas, is that the brainwashees have so little real world experience to compare against what they're being taught. Someone who's starting college at the age of 30, after 8 years of full time work and financial self-sufficiency, isn't likely to be persuaded to major in "Peace Studies" or "Queer Studies", and a college where more than half the students were in that age range wouldn't even offer such majors. They sure couldn't convince me that socialism made sense, after I'd worked with several dozen fast-food employees who were refugees from the various socialist utopias of Asia. But they had no trouble convincing most of the kids who'd come straight from Suburban High.
I entered college in 94 at U of Southern California, Transferred to Michigan, spent a semester in Cambridge, went to law school at Cornell and spent a summer at the Sorbonne. The only place where I saw a significant number of students "goofing off" was at USC, and most of the partiers were rich frat boys and sorority girls whose future was set, no matter what.
Do a lot of college kids party hard? Absolutely, but they also work incredibly hard, too. Go to the library of any college at midnight and you'll find a large number of kids studying.
All at a tab of around $30,000 per student per year, to whoever's paying.
That's the tab for a fairly expensive private school. It has been my general experience that the hard-core party schools are the lower-cost state schools.
One of the major downsides of starting college late (and then business school, med. school or law school etc.) is the fact that you are losing several years of earnings. Now, there's nothing wrong with a job as a manager of a fast food restaurant. However, if you have the means to go to college right out of college, followed by law school (as an example) you could be earning $125,000+ at age 25.