There are plenty of things I didn't fully understand as a student, not just academic things but self-realization "youth is wasted on the young" type learnings,

There are plenty of things I didn't fully understand as a student, not just academic things but self-realization "youth is wasted on the young" type learnings, which I suspect impacts all of us BUT, I bet if you look at the data, things like DARE and driver's ed and sex ed v abstinance education have measurable, statistical impacts on what people believe and how they act. ALSO, there are plenty of jobs out there for technical work. Each of us decides what people and organizations we are comfortable supporting with our labor. It's not a perfectly free decision, and there are plenty of individual trade-offs to make, but we're hardly passive players.