But there is another reason why conservatives are so keen on dissing college education and pushing for trade schools: and it is purely economic.

As more and more professions and trades require university training (whether justified or not), there is also a shortage of workers in all non-academic fields. Plumbers, car mechanics, truck drivers, construction workers etc become scarcer, and market forces drive up their incomes. Rich people don't like paying mere tradesmen big bucks, it offends their sense of economic entitlement and entrepreneurial privilege. The fact that working- and lower class kids (like me) can go to college and become hippy civil rights and labor lawyers infuriates them. So there is a hidden social and financial motive for the attack on higher education and the sudden encouragement of "trade school" instruction.

This is not the first time this has happened. I remember in the 1970s, when I was graduating from college, there was a whole lot of propaganda going about, aimed at young people, saying; "You don't have to go to college, there's good money to be made in [insert your shit job of choice here]". Too many poor family kids were suddenly competing with elite youngsters for high-paying corporate positions. College was cheap in those days, the costs were defrayed by taxpayer-funded programs and cheap state public colleges, and a degree was no longer a guaranteed benefit reserved for the upper classes. The ownership/executive classes had no problem with the taxpayer sending THEIR kids to college, but when they graduated they found themselves competing with proletarian youth now qualified to compete with them for administrative and entrepreneurial positions. And you couldn't get a decent plumber for love or money any more! Hell, if it wasn't for all the illegal aliens now being feverishly recruited to do lower level jobs at slave wages, it might even be necessary to start paying American workers a living wage. Oh, the humanity.

Like I've said before, there is nothing new under the sun. If you live long enough you start noticing certain patterns repeating themselves.