Roughly speaking, about 1/4 of people should go through STEM university training, and the rest should graduate high school able to work.
The problem is that we teach nonsense after 6th grade. Roughly half of all educational hours are wasted.
In my understanding we should enter people into the workforce between 12 and 14 given their rate of maturity, and teach life tools a few hours a day: money, accounting, economics, basic contracts. In fact, it’s very interesting that we teach all the sciences OTHER than the one that is most important: COOPERATION. Instead of cooperation we teach SUBMISSION.
If we were to do this we would extend work lives, and reverse infantilization, as well as all but eliminate the difficulty entering the work force. We would have vast programs of teaching-in-the-workplace at very low wages, and produce the highest skilled people in the world.
We could have fully socialized people, a more competente work force, have children in our late teens and twenties, and far lower costs.