alt Hacker News>The opposite, expecting everyone in the country to aspire to white-collar professions, is to me much more clearly an elitist (or at least irrational) position to have.
This, when you have everyone go to college and then they'll be shocked to be unemployed or work for peanuts since there's an oversupply of college grads and not much demand.
Here in Austria people working in construction cam earn way better than SW engineers because the former have an oversupply and the latter a shortage.
If you need a mobile app or a Java app, the're dime a dozen developers but if you need a plumber, lock smith, facade, roof specialist, well good luck.
The days when a college degree were an instant ticket to a well paid job for life are over.
It's not even an issue of job scarcity.
I have worked enough blue-collar jobs to know that there exist people for whom technical work is a non-starter. Not that they are somehow dim and incapable of learning engineering, but "work" that is not done through labor, that does not show in a tangible way a day's effort… is anathema to them.