Daniel 1:4
Daniel 1:44young men without blemish, handsome, gifted in all wisdom, knowledgeable, quick to understand, and qualified to serve in the king’s palace—and to teach them the language and literature of the Chaldeans.
JW publications acknowledge Daniel's Babylonian education as background to his later prophetic role but rarely cite the verse in connection with the higher-education question. The Watchtower's discouragement of university typically appeals to risks of immorality and worldly philosophy, framed against the pioneer alternative — without engaging the biblical pattern of God's faithful learning inside pagan academic systems.
Daniel and his three companions are deliberately enrolled by the Babylonian state in a three-year course "in the literature and language of the Chaldeans." This is full immersion in a pagan academic system at its highest level — Babylonian astronomy, divination texts, mythology, omen literature — and the narrative names it without apology. The faithfulness Daniel later demonstrates is not faithfulness in spite of the education but faithfulness shaped by it: he is the man God uses precisely because he learned the system well enough to interpret the king's dreams and counsel Babylon's rulers from inside. The Watchtower's categorical discouragement of higher education has no biblical warrant here; the Bible's actual pattern is the opposite.