Is it time to take a page out of Mao Zedong's playbook, and send urban elites to the countryside to unlearn their hubris?

The previous post got me thinking. When it's in-your-face obvious that a 30yo university grad's standard of living in the big city is in virtually every aspect lagging far behind the standard of living of a 30yo high school grad, or even a high school drop-out, in small-town Ontario, maybe it's time to shake things up a little.

Generally speaking, the folks who make a go of it in these small towns have something to offer. Don't need to be fancy, but does need to be useful. Teachers, truck-drivers, nursing home staff, drywallers, painters, plumbers, dental hygienists, cooks, farm hands, and so on. If you've got useful skills you'll be fine, and most of these jobs don't requite much formal ed at all, but we're happy to pay for what they do.

On the other hand, there's been a vast underclass of the over-educated growing like topsy. These are the folks who manage to spend their six or eight or twelve years of post secondary accumulating massive debt in exchange for credentials that are today worthless, or at least worthless-adjacent. I can't put my finger on it, but as a guy who took way too many soc courses, I've observed that the more your college major involved interrogating intersectionality, the less likely you'll have anything to offer these little communities.  

That said, there's nothing about that PhD, that you're paying off with a lifetime of sessional precarity, that prevents you from learning to drive a truck!