In Germany the trades are considered honourable professions, the workmanship and quality exceptional. A cultural residue of the medieval guild system. Cheap shoddy goods are disdained. Students are streamed in late public school and not coddled with false praise but take pride in actual achievement against high standards - whether academic or trade. We seem to do the opposite - with predictable results.
During my early career worked for a Canadian company with extensive hard tooled automation - the stuff was amazing, state of the art. ALL designed in-house, built in their own machine shop ( to accuracies of 0.0002 in. ). The staff were all German immigrant tool & die makers, not a university graduate to be seen.
Today the German economy competes on a global basis even with high labour costs, the economy at government surplus.
There is a message there !