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.

Rightwingers constantly make internet posts suggesting that going to college makes people less intelligent. “These high IQ stupid people”? FuxNews has been dissing higher education for years, and pushing for more trade schools. Why? Because educated people see right through their bullshit machine. Keep the masses down by keeping them stupid and feeding them culture wars.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I just don’t know anymore. Remember when the joke was that President Ford played too much football without a helmet? Walker had one and he is seriously brain damaged, along with anyone who votes for him.