Just because all the people who touted globalization went to college doesn't mean that college was the reason for it. That's ridiculously surface-level thinking.
Higher education also gave us all the people who told us that was a bad idea, with graphs, and sources, and evidence.
Higher education also gave us all the people who did the research that created the technologies we're using today.
Higher education also gave us all the doctors, lawyers, engineers, rocket scientists, brain surgeons, and literally every other highly skilled worker we have.
Higher education is absolutely vital to any functioning modern society.
From where I'm sitting it looks like you've got a chip on your shoulder against higher education, and are attempting to reduce the entire sector—which is incredibly diverse—to a single genuinely bad viewpoint that you don't even provide any evidence higher education produced (as opposed to simply "a few ideologically motivated people who received higher education produced").
Every time a civil war erupts in the middle east there's some warmongers screeching "but what about the <ethnic/religious minority in the relevant country>, we ought to care about them" as a pretext for getting involved.
You are engaging in the exact same. The primary reason academic labs churn out technological advancement for Microsoft, Exxon, etc, etc, is because the tax code makes it preferential to do that rather than run the same thing in-house.
Also, I would like to note the slight of hand you just pulled between education and academia. There is no problem with doctors and lawyers getting their training. But that is absolutely distinct from professional academia. Those people are the customers. They are in and out.
The institutions themselves are absolutely corrupt. It is very comparable to the catholic church scooping up all the wealth in europe in the 13-1500s and justifying it by embedding themselves in mundane parts of society and then screeching "but without us who will do the thing" as if that justified everything else they were up to. (Though to be fair, academia is not the only institution subject to such criticism these days).
Saying "the entire institution of higher education is not collectively responsible for this specific bad economic policy choice" is somehow equivalent to saying "we should go kill hundreds of thousands of people to protect the poor Kurds/Palestinians/Israelis/etc"??
No; even leaving aside your apparent (and wild) misconception that "academia" is a unified, monolithic body akin to the medieval Catholic Church, unless you're willing to dial down your rhetoric to something less self-indulgently overdramatic and engage with actual reality in a vaguely reasonable manner, I don't think there's much point in continuing this discussion.
> the people who told us that globalization would make us all richer .......
Your comment is exactly the kind of thinking these people want you to use. They want you to doubt every institution and have some anecdote about why it is the right way to think, when in reality it is the doing of a few elites, not institutions that are largely made up of people like you an mean. They want culture war between us instead of class warfare against them.
Perhaps one day people will start paying attention to the wealth inequality gap and realize what is going on... but increasinly unlikely if you demonize and undermine academia
Higher education also gave us all the people who told us that was a bad idea, with graphs, and sources, and evidence.
Higher education also gave us all the people who did the research that created the technologies we're using today.
Higher education also gave us all the doctors, lawyers, engineers, rocket scientists, brain surgeons, and literally every other highly skilled worker we have.
Higher education is absolutely vital to any functioning modern society.
From where I'm sitting it looks like you've got a chip on your shoulder against higher education, and are attempting to reduce the entire sector—which is incredibly diverse—to a single genuinely bad viewpoint that you don't even provide any evidence higher education produced (as opposed to simply "a few ideologically motivated people who received higher education produced").