Education isn't all about going to class to learn about something for your job. It teaches you certain ways to think, which can prove to be invaluable in ANY field you want to work in.
I'm going to have to agree 100% with Towelie. While crazed is right in a sense that there are jobs you can make a good living off of without going to college, how many of those jobs are there to spare? With a good portion of jobs being sent from the state to overseas, that eliminates a good amount of blue collar jobs that are left. Not saying that learning a trade skill such as carpentry of plumbing is bad, but, as far as I see now, a great deal of people are not going to college and going into some sort of trade, which will create an abundance of people with some sort of trade skill who do not have a job, whilst you can go to college and learn another trade, get a degree, and live a more comfortable lifestyle than knucklegrinding for 30 years of your life.
While it is true that many blue collar jobs are going overseas, there are a great many that pretty much physically have to be done here, from plumbers to auto-mechanics to all sorts of other such trades. Now, you are right insofar as if most people were to shift that way, rather than going to college going basically directly into a trade, there would be problems with the market being flooded with those skills and labor, but there is no risk of that happening at this point.
In fact, the pendulum is way out the other way--the colleges are flooded, and a great many of the people there are most likely not going to get much of anything useful out of it, while the trades are suffering in quality and growing overly expensive out of lack of people. In that sense CrAz3d's point is absolutely valid: many people who are going to college should instead go vocational. It would not be valid to say that most people who are going to college should go vocational, which would take the pendulum in the opposite direction, being similarly destructive. There needs to be a balance.
I personally think that there should be more vocational training available in the public schools. There was an auto-mechanics class in high school in my parent's day, but when I went there (I actually went to the same school as my mother) it was gone. The facilities remained, but the class was not there. The point of public education, in many respects, seems to be to get you ready to go to college. They should offer a lot of options for people who don't want to go in that direction--people who remain crucial to our economy.
But I really shouldn't get started on the education system as a whole.