It is simple - college education there is viewed (and I am not sure it is undeserved) as just part of the process to get papers to be employable. I do not know first-hand how useful knowledge received at US colleges is, but I certainly believe it is more of a theatrical show in some other countries with elements of burning in a "good citizen firmware" into students' heads.

I should've given more context. Based on my anecdata in post-Soviet world, ~50% of graduates choose a job completely unrelated to their degree (e.g. a chemist becomes web designer, a linguist becomes QA engineer, and economist becomes barista). They probably realize this during first 1-2 years in college, but they carry along because it's just easier this way, they made friends with classmates, and education is free or cheap.

The point is, they don't care at all about the academic problems because it's (a) not interesting to them and (b) usually professors don't motivate students with real-life examples. E.g. while microeconomics is very much relevant for everyone, the way it was taught to us, it felt insanely boring and inapplicable to real problems.

They become managers and hire other people to solve the problem.

Well, toy academic problems often have no relevance to real problems.