One thing I think a lot of people don't internalize is that academia and industry have fundamentally different goals. When I went into industry, I had the thought, like many others, that "my degree didn't prepare me at all for working with a production database, and I'm never gonna implement a Turing machine, wtf?" I think it was a major disservice to academia when college became seen as the path to a good job, because it was never meant to be that.

Academia is about pure learning about the world in a very deep and philosophical sense. It's about underpinnings and history and giving you the abstract tools to reason about things. Academics are often aggressively against learning practical things to solve a specific business problem. Which is what industry is all about. I think it's easy to take a degree program for granted, but it's difficult to understand how your brain would be different had you not done it (assuming one did apply themself and attempt to get its value. If you just cursed it the whole time yeah it probably was a waste.)