Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

Bachelor Degrees need a complete rethink, it was basically modified finishing school for rich capital owners, needing to make their children of proper class before they could take over their businesses.

It then became a vocational degree for the working class, despite being completely detached from useful skills for a wide swathes of degrees. The only value is that you could talk the talk and become a member of the professional managerial class if you impressed the right hiring committee/individual.

In spite of this, we decided the working class should take out crippling loans to pay for this degree, and be in debt for the rest of their working life.

It's not sustainable, and just forgiving the debt only will make it all more expensive and less aligned with actual results we desire (useful workers).

Maybe lower education should just have a different schedule with other activity years? I'm not particularly impressed with the average American's ability to be a positive element of society and despite all the problems, I think liberal arts students are probably better than the rest when considered over their lifetime. But why should each individual take loans to have the critical thinking to vote in the interest of larger institutions?

Does liberal arts teach critical thinking? Do students who study liberal arts vs a mathematics/engineering show greater improvements on critical thinking tests?

I get the idea we want a more educated population that can better make decisions. But the biggest way the populace makes poor decisions is they are economically illiterate, and they don't really understand how the government works. We should probably spend more time teaching this in high school and a typical degree spends very little time teaching these subjects.

The populace making poor decisions isn't just economically illiterate, they are increasingly fundamentally illiterate. Teaching economic literacy in school won't matter one bit when an increasing number of people are graduating unable to read even at a basic level.

But in order to solve this problem you would have to overhaul our educational system and right now we have a party invested in destroying it so that it produces voters more aligned with their groupthink.

While there are a variety of different interest groups that have influenced current federal government education policy, most of them don't seem to be trying destroy it just for the sake of destruction. Instead the policy seems to be based more on the perception that the education system has been co-opted and corrupted to indoctrinate students with values and political philosophies that conservative or right-wing politicians find abhorrent. They see this as so damaging to society that it would be better to have no educational system at all rather than what we have now. I don't agree with this perception or their actions, but there is at least a kernel of truth to their viewpoint. In a politically diverse nation if we want to maintain broad based support for higher education then we need to find a way to keep universities at least somewhat politically neutral.