I was appalled when I saw several articles in the Boston and New York papers and an article by Steve Marino of home-tech.com about POTUS' plan to cut ANOTHER 20% from the vocational education budget while increasing the Education budget another 11% to $51 billion, less than 2% of the budget goes to vocational program. In 1975 the education department budget was $17 billion, has education really improved?   And the President wants to cut it another 20% in 2012!  While raising spending on education 11%, how many unskilled people can the economy absorb?  Less than a third of all students actually go to and complete college.  The unskilled rely on their youth and brawn to get jobs, and most of these unskilled jobs have gone away with the economic downturn, primarily in construction.
Not everyone needs or wants a college education, why can't our government and educational system see this?
Plus, there has been an all out attack on for profit schools that do turn out skilled workers.  Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater just because of a few opportunists.  It needs to be back in the public school system.  Screw the liability issues, the labeling of students as non-college material, heck 2/3's of them are already, lets start building skills again so our youth is employable beyond saying: "Would you like fries with that?"