There are a lot of really good schools in flyover states. Looking at the top 10 engineering schools in the US, depending on your definition of "flyover," there's CMU, Michigan, Purdue, Illinois, and UT.
But it also has a broad problem of lack of quality of high school level education. Maybe a few good suburban school but the average is terrible.
Tuscaloosa is education center of Alabama, having the university of Alabama but secondary education is bad enough stop companies locating there.
"Around the late 1980s/early 1990s Saturn chose not to locate a plant in Tuscaloosa because of the performance of the public schools, and by 1993 the city leadership wanted Mercedes-Benz to build a plant there."
What makes this amusing is Saturn was probably looking to open plants in the South because most of the states are right-to-work states that are more business friendly and have fewer worker protections. The less-government approach that attracted them there also drove them away because less government also meant worse schools and worse workers.
The problem is political dynamics meant that the attitudes of the backward parts of the country have actually set policy for quite a while. That benefited American corporations in the short term - lots of CEO probably think for-profit, student-loan-driven education is a great idea. But it's harmed the US and even US corporations as these policies show their longer term results.