Right, but the same thing will happen to vocational schools. It's not like a vocational school is like a proper CS degree but with different courses, equally hard. So the vocational school needs to cater to an audience that, let me say this in the nicest way possible, is not very much interested in fine intellectual nuances.

Now it depends on how one defines 'inferior', but vocational training is inherently 'easier' than an academic approach; vocational training is about telling people how to solve certain problems, showing the the steps to take to tackle a specific situation. The Wikipedia article on 'vocational training' says more or less that, although I just learned that it's called 'procedural knowledge' there, which is a nice euphemism.

To me, this is the antithesis of the problem-solving nature of programming. I guess one can call widget-plumbing 'programming', but I wouldn't (and don't) hire people who install and maybe, with much effort and pain, customize Wordpress plugins and call themselves 'programmers'. Nothing wrong with Wordpress, but we shouldn't strive for a situation where that is the pinnacle of a programmer's expertise.