In my experience in a STEM field where a B.S. degree is a bare minimum requirement for professional licensure, I have found that the best employees I ever had were high school graduates who started as interns and learned about the working world before they were poisoned by college.
Agreed. In the software industry, particularly when involving complex software design and not just drawing up fancy screens, if interviewing applicants for a junior programmer (no experience) a BS in CS or EE was a must. But always without exception the best of those workers were the ones who worked full time while in college even if it meant taking 6 or 8 years to complete their BS. Their experience doing grunt work in their younger years made them better code jockeys later (as was the effect on me). And fortunately for me in Alabama decades ago when I got a BS in CS, the CS courses and math courses didn't have the woke mess -- only the liberal arts "core" courses had that and most of us CS students slept through those courses anyway. Not once did any of my CS or math instructors bring up any of that mess. Of the few times a student tried to bring it up to show off his liberal bona fides, my CS and math instructors shut them up and told them we didn't have time for that mess, sometimes saying the liberal student should apologize to all the other students for interfering with the education the students were paying for.