They really don't.
I have been saying for a couple years now that there's a distinct lack of critical thinking here in the US, and it's mostly due to our education system being built to teach you to be compliant and get you used to a strict schedule with a bell, much like at old factory jobs.
In my understanding the framework for the modern public school system (K-12) in the US was developed near the turn of the 20^th^ century to basically be a school-factory pipeline, which is why we see the strict bell structure of classes and lunch as well as beginning/end of day, and the entirely authoritarian approach of teachers who take the attitude of "Don't do that because I said so" instead of actually showing and teaching the students why they should behave and meeting them where they're at, and then are surprised when students continue to misbehave and blame overworked parents for their kids' bad behavior when the system we live under requires parents of school-age children to be absent for the majority of their children's childhood just to put food on the table and keep a roof over their head. More recently with the rise of the prison-industrial complex public schools in lower-income areas have also become a sort of school-prison pipeline, especially for minority students.
As far as colleges and universities, this is absolutely correct. Most of the students now that go through any college but especially community colleges and such will sadly never get a job in the field that they're studying for, and will end up in the service sector, which actually is what happened to me.