I think it is a very valuable use of time for every college-bound student because the need to understand algebra pops up when you least expect it in college.
For example, my daughter took two basic, not-for-majors astronomy courses to fulfill her science general education requirement in college. Some people suffered through those courses and got poor grades because there was some math involved – though nothing more sophisticated than algebra.
And then a couple of years later, she was an undergraduate TA for a finance course and she had to try to help students who understood the finance concepts but couldn’t complete their problem sets or get the test questions right because the problems they were required to solve involved basic equations and they didn’t understand how to set up or solve the equations.