I felt like the top quartile of my college class was getting nothing out of the education because they were too far ahead and the bottom two quartiles were getting nothing out of it because they were too far behind.

Didn’t they used to have multiple paths through pre-uni education back then? Where did they go, budget cuts, parental pressure, societal pressure, …? There’s a whole lot of tasks that have to be carried out to make things work, and somebody somewhere has to train people for them. Especially if the companies expect their new workers to be able to “hit the ground running”.

The uni’s aren’t helping if they want to be profit centres or worse, have to be centres to have the funding to survive. All sorts of groups are stakeholders in the education pipeline. If society wants “a certain educational product”, it should provide adequate funds, enforce standards and tier or track the process as needed. Make it a utility rather than a profit centres.