"they sit a lot and listen a lot"
For most of our couple hundred thousand year existence as a species we've been very successful using every learning technique except "sit down shut up and listen for a couple hours". In fact we've only done it for about a century almost exclusively with lower to middle class white European kids and all that's certain about that technique is its mostly resulted in the production of a lot of cannon fodder and factory (now cubical) drones. For most of our species history the shut up and listen technique has been limited to religion and brainwashing; perhaps there is no difference.
Its likely that what we arrogantly claim is education or training is merely implantation of weird religious beliefs via brainwashing, as opposed to actual education. Does it matter if the kid mindlessly repeats that 2+2=4, or the kid irrationally believes 2+2=4, or the kid understands how 2+2=4? In a world where all that matters is the correct oval is filled in on the endlessly growing number of standardized tests, I'm not optimistic anyone is learning anything other than to fill in ovals and parrot a belief in whatever this hour's authority claims is today's truth. Until tomorrow when it'll all be different.
This might explain how some new grads are so hopelessly useless in that perhaps they absorbed the "true believer" aesthetic and therefore were passed along, but they were never actually educated, never actually learned, perhaps algebra, or programming, or philosophy, or politics, or any other topic.
"I learned how to tell the teacher what they wanted to hear, then forgot it as completely as possible so as to endlessly repeat" could result in a very successful student career yet not so successful post-graduation.