VOCATIONAL EDUCATION goes to college.

What used to be a classical liberal education has morphed into a non-classical 'woke' education which utterly destroyed its present value. A classical liberal education was --and remains -- valuable to those who could afford the price of graduating without an immediately valuable economic skill. For example, our Founders, almost without exception, were classically educated, learned little of immediate economic benefit to themselves and yet that knowlege gave us our founding documents

It was the Morrill Act, the ability to gain immediately useful economic skills beyond those available through secondary education, that allowed me to go to college. And the added advantage was that I had access to at least some of that classic liberal education in terms of the elective requirements at that time.

But no more. Even in the hard sciences (mathematics, engineering, physics, chemistry, etc.) liberal 'wokeness' has infected their curriculum.

[But] there is evidence that hope exists. Findings from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reveal that college enrollment “dropped by more than 2 million from 2011 to 2019” before the pandemic. In 2020 alone, undergraduate enrollment fell 4.5 percent—the largest decline in several decades.

Could it be that young people have been wildly oversold on the importance of a bachelor’s degree? With welders now earning $150,000 annually and free of student debt, a day of reckoning may be on the horizon. Perhaps more and more students will see that a two-year technical program or trade school is a more rewarding path.

I rather suspect that Mike Rowe's television shows 'Dirty Jobs' and 'How America Works' will help make that so.

Two final notes: First, classical liberal education -- what I tend to call a Great Books of the Western World education -- is available online for those interested in the topics and not caring about being 'credentialed'.

And second, now that I'm retired and moved outside the urban and engineering 'bubbles' I used to inhabit, I'm heartened to find that the tradespeople (see Mike Rowe above) I deal with on a regular basis are much more knowledgeable (and capable) than the average 'credentialed' Harvard graduate.