Looking down on the military, pretty typical of the liberal. The only use the liberal in America has for the military is as a social petri dish to try out experimentation such as allowing the LGBTQ community to serve openly, facilitate the proper use of pronouns, and to hunt white supremacists.
Lolling around college for 4 - 6 years isn't the most productive use of everyone's time. Some people just aren't wired for that. A degree is actually not the ultimate indicator of intelligence.
To your pithy comment, the fact of the matter is, there are a hell of a lot of very intelligent and motivated people that joined the military because they were raised in circumstances where both college and jobs were not an option. They serve their time and then get out of the military and go on to do great things as civilians and they don't have to go into ridiculous amounts of debt to go to college if that's what they want to do. The difference with the metal of people that join the military is that they take matters into their own hands rather than waiting for Uncle Joe to bail them out.