Originally Posted by Tigerle
Seriously, the one difference is that while most of us couldn't care less about raising standards for low skilled people in sports, we do all of us have a stake in raising standards in academic skills related to employment prospects. There may have to be some trade off.

Getting back to an earlier point I made, the outsourcing of manufacturing and other unskilled or semiskilled jobs has made this problem much more acute. Another part of it is that the jobs in those categories that remain here now pay below a living wage. This is all part of the education mess we have and drives the "everyone should go to college" foolishness.