Education can mean vocational training too, not just university degrees.
A plumber or electrician in Seattle can pull in 100k/year and they are booked out for weeks to months.
A plumber or electrician in Seattle can pull in 100k/year and they are booked out for weeks to months.
If you tried to scale this up in practice, you'd quickly find that you don't need 3x the number of plumbers that exist now.
Increase the number of electricians or plumbers 10-fold and their wages would plummet.
If there were twice the plumbers, the rate per hour would not be halved. There's demand that can't afford these services at the current rate.
[1] http://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/plumbers-...
But you don't just offer training for a single vocation as that would be silly.
That said, it might still be a worthwhile policy to pursue, since vocational education has been neglected for decades in favor of 'college for all', which IMO is misguided.
I feel that it is very easy to get trapped in the mindset that I am owed something based on my prior experience. Reluctance to think beyond past experience, fear of leaving behind what I worked hard to learn, or fear of failure in a new area are all things that have held me back in my own life.
I would disagree that people can not provide value beyond what they did before. Except in cases of physical or mental disability, it's more likely a self-imposed barrier.