This is akin to saying, "It's not for the doctor to tell you how to live your life." True enough; but you ignore their advice at your own peril.
That an education is a path to economic stability and mobility is not a matter of opinion. To write this off as snobbery is shooting the messenger.
There will always be a distribution of skills. And that distribution of skills required by the market needs to match the education of the populace. "Smart" is a superlative; "educated in a particular field" is merely an attribute.
Manufacturing is not coming back. We need to move on, and soon.
Until you can convince Americans as a whole that they will have to pay more for goods made in the USA to employ Americans, jobs which were once done in the USA but are now cheaper to be done overseas will never see a return. Trade wars or import taxes won't fix that it will only exacerbate the problem.
What happens when tariff is raised and a pair of Levis from China now have to sell 120 bucks a pair? and if you produce that in US, since you dont have tariff, its 60 bucks a pair? what you think factory is going to do?
My question is if the cost of goods will rise enough to make wage gains irrelevant, or if the effect won't be strong enough and we'll see real wage gains.
when you have a 100 bucks a pair Levis vs 5 bucks a pair of local made jean (which came out of same factory), Chinese are most likely to buy the 5 bucks one, and therefore Chinese govt effectively protect their local business, took job from USA and helped every local economy with American investing dollars.
And what happens to the cost of goods once everything is manufactured in the US, paying workers a living wage? In increase in the price of all products hurts the poorer and middle classes the most.
And what happens when more and more automation takes over? Then all the import tariffs in the world will be of no help to the welders and sewers you chose to let stagnate instead of improving their access to education and training.
One can hope that a government will consider its people "their own". Though that is not always the case.
It is the height of snobbery to move the lesser skilled jobs out of the country and tell everyone they need to be smarter. There will always be a distribution of skills and it is not for the well educated to say "you just need to be like us". All the US needs to do is stop signing 900 page "free trade" agreements and start adjusting import taxes to bring manufacturing back. Call it what you will, but taking care of your own first is not a bad thing.