This type of thing has been targeted at high school students and undergrads. There are often cash prizes, comped travel, and companies are eager to give a lot

This type of thing has been targeted at high school students and undergrads. There are often cash prizes, comped travel, and companies are eager to give a lot of these people interviews. I'm fairly confident the US government is happy to shower this type of thing with money as well. This is like ACM programming competitions. A significant number of the teams on ctftime.org represent colleges world wide. CTF's come with points and scores and ranks. Why do people play recreational sports? Why do people do escape rooms or puzzle hunts or any of that other stuff? As far as methods used to solve CTF problems, the practical knowledge gained from solving many CTF problems is directly applicable to future jobs in a way that other methods (like the majority of college homework) are not. If you do CTF's, you will definitely have to write programs that interact with file formats and you will definitely have to write programs that interface with webservers, and you are very likely to get into the esoteric edge cases of various languages that will result in a fairly deep understanding of how languages work past a few reserved words and a couple data structures. There are even problems that will draw you into learning about signal processing or how punch cards used to work.