You can view an undergraduate education (and especially a graduate education) as a significantly negatively paid (or at best unpaid) internship for the job of academia.
This has all the advantages of internships that employer's normally enjoy. The internship enables you to hire significantly better employees than you'd otherwise be able to get in the open market, because you can engage in more vetting and because of the power of defaults.
Many smart people go into academia who would have been much happier and more productive outside of it simply because going to school itself made pursuing a job in academia something much more of a default than it would have been for many people.
This has all the advantages of internships that employer's normally enjoy. The internship enables you to hire significantly better employees than you'd otherwise be able to get in the open market, because you can engage in more vetting and because of the power of defaults.
Many smart people go into academia who would have been much happier and more productive outside of it simply because going to school itself made pursuing a job in academia something much more of a default than it would have been for many people.