I didn't mean to imply that. What I'm trying to say -evidently poorly- is that in our increasingly technical world, it is increasingly important to have technical education. Because the jobs that don't require it are disappearing from our shores.....We have few muscle jobs, we have tools that make rooms full of paper-pushers redundant...what's left?

Like, most of the jobs in our economy. Most jobs don't require a technical education - if you look at the ten largest categories of jobs, only "registered nurse" absolutely requires a degree:

bls.gov - Area emp chart

One of the largest categories of employment in the U.S. is "General and Operations Managers." That's exactly the sort of job that doesn't require a degree to actually do, but which we now typically screen for a degree in order to get. For no purpose.

I think I said in my original post that we need to make education more affordable and accessible. Hard to deal with the cultural aspect, but we certainly can deal with the socio-economic part.

But why? Returning to my Latin example, suppose we see a disturbing trend in the U.S. economy - employers are increasingly insisting that candidates demonstrate a facility with Latin in order to get hired. Latin is, of course, utterly useless in terms of performing a job. But employers like using Latin as a screen - after all, none of the "wrong" type of people know Latin.

The policy response to this situation should not be to make access to Latin "more affordable and accessible." The Latin is useless. It's a waste of resources for everyone to learn Latin in order to get jobs that don't require Latin. What you want to do is get the employers to stop using Latin as a hiring requirement, so that people who don't pursue Latin can still get those jobs.