education has lost its value because your labour pool is chronically underutilized due to mass immigration. when you have saturated labour markets, employers don't need to invest and develop their employees because another one is waiting in the wings. to even get an opportunity to enter white collar industries, you not only need an education but you need to have been prepared for this pipeline as a child and not deviated from it due to competition. china is the same way due to its population size but it also has so many people that they still have an enormous talent pool anyways, despite their poor utilization. if you want americans to be useful you need to create the conditions where employers are forced to invest in them, because if you give them the option of flooding the labour pool they will always choose that because its the path of least resistance
Canada