Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
I think a part of it is that people piled too much into the white collar jobs and universities, and the supply-demand balance shifted such that what used to be solid middle class white collar jobs ended up being well below middle class wages and fell behind many skilled blue collar jobs. And as mentioned above a lot of these jobs are semi-obsolete or just not that productive while the blue collar jobs were less automated.
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This is very true. When I was a kid, Mom & Dad didn't care what we wanted to study BUT we were going to university. Full stop. You can do whatever you want but you are going to get those 2 letters behind your name. This, of course, was not just social attitudes but also educational priorities by school boards. They did everything and anything to gear kids towards university. If you didn't go there you were considered "uneducated" regardless if you went to college for years to get a trade.
Educational attainment directly follows what your parents did and hence getting a degree, regardless of how useful or even if you want one, is now so grained into our youth and education system that college is still second best at best. This is why we have such a highly educated workforce but at the same time such a poorly trained one. Most northern European countries have higher per-capita GDP than Canda but often have significantly lower university attainment because a skilled trade is valued by society in Europe whereas in Canada it is still seen as manual labour for the uneducated "working class".