I don't think you can blame globalization for that,
-technology has eliminated many jobs
-companies have become more efficient at "desklling" workers into more narrowly defined roles (and so paying lower wages)
if you want to attack free markets, why not go further and advocate barriers on inter-state commerce within the US.
The decreasing cost of manufactured goods, increase in quality of them, and the increase in GDP that has occurred over the past 30 years. (You can argue much of this can be attributed to technology, but a large share of it is due to outsourcing - most things in dollar stores and walmart are not due to technology but outsourcing).
The rustbelt is caused by their inability to compete with the better quality Japanese cars (and Japanese salaries are higher than in the rustbelt, you can't make the cheap labour for that).
What about the children of poorer families who don't have the luxury of going to college. The above would be fine if parents/students were paying the full cost of the facilities, but in most cases its government/charity subsidized.
But you're assuming outsourcing is bad for individuals in the US, whereas most indications are the opposite, it increases their wealth. The point about the nongrad IT worker is that he would be able to create more wealth than he would as a local service worker (in the same way as offshore workers do). Increasing production (and hence wealth) from all workers, whether offshore or in US is better for society than allowing inefficiencies and protectionism to prevail.
A better way to teach how to learn to learn, would be to teach a class in exactly that. The motivational speaker industry does a better job in "meta" subjects, such as "getting things done", "how to be successful", than college does. Paul Graham's essays for startups are more effective than college courses in entrepreneurship.
I would go further to say that the current system is disadvantaging rich countries immensely. I typical person without a college degree is likely to think he shouldn't even attempt to seek work such as IT (it's for those college educated types), and instead heads into the local service economy (further depressing wages there), instead of earning money for the country in globally based economy.
In the UK, the higher education system is as you desribed in point 1, you get a degree in exactly your subject. yet they have no shortage of people who can debate on the issues you mention in point 2.
Requiring everyone to learn some nonpractical things is a waste of societal resources. If some people want to learn something just for the sake of it, they could join reading groups/attend lectures on their own time.
I'm trying to draw a parallel between how content on the web is being created and how an artificial mind might be created. If you sat down at tried to engineer a giant encyclopedia within one company/community, you would end up with britannica (within one company), and wikipedia (within a community of enthusiasts), However, the web at large is much larger than both of these because of the economic incentives for people to create articles. Many people try and fail (in effect working for free), but the progress is rapid, as in evolution.
In the same way, incentivizing people to produce classifiers would have the similar effect of rapid progress.
If you think of intelligence as being the ability to predict accurately, having a giant web of classifiers that predict accurately could be construed as a form of artificial general intelligence, or a human type artificial intelligence. Having an enough data about the world, because you have created many classifiers that can recognize the semantic events in video and speech, would allow you to make all the same types of recognitions and predictions that a human would make.
My point is about the "democratization" of classifer creation. I personally am not a programmer and don't have the talent to create a startup, and there are millions more people like me. However, if there were a place where i could feed some data and have a classifier hosted somewhere I could participate in this.
It's the same way blogs allowed many more people to start creating content on the web, whereas previously it required creating and hosting a website. Or how google app engine, might increase the creeation of web applications because previously a lot of people didn't have knowledge of administering and scaling unix/dbms based applications.
A large company would seriously have a look at roi, whereas many small entrepreneurs just have a go at it. Britannica (large company) is smaller than wikipedia (community of individuals), which is again smaller than the content on the web at large (community of incentivized small entrepreneurs).
Yes, what I'm saying is there are far too few of these, there's over a million developers out there. Even many of these strikeiron services are just news, you send a small query and get a simple result, rather than sending a complicated spreadsheet of data and having it transformed and returned.
That's exactly my initial reason for posting this. In the singulariy enthusiast community artificial intelligence is the most important thing we as humans can create (post scarcity, immortality etc).
What I was suggesting is that a "gold rush" type situation form around the building of classifiers, such as that occurred with website creation. There are millions trying to get an income onlne creating content for adsense and affilate programs (and for free with wikipedia and open source). Most will fail at generating reasonable income but in the process a large amount of wealth has been created. The same could be done for classifiers/artifical intelligence. It would require just collecting a thousand or two pieces of data (image/sudio/text) to create a classifier, an effort similar to creating a small website.
The problem is that even in the past there really wasn't a large number of people working on artificial intelligence, maybe just a few hundred or thousand, and computing power wasn't cheap enough to make it work. Computer scientists that do work on it are trying to create more unique algorithms that can be published, rather than creating applications with existing working algorithms (after all they''re paid to create new things, not simply apply what's available). In Larry Page's lecture at AAAS he mentioned that there are less than a hundred people working on artificial (general) intelligence today. (you can see it on youtube).
True, they are applications of machine learning techniques and can be considered "narrow ai".
What I was suggesting is more along the lines of something that can do the tasks of children, see and recongize most things, and understand language. I think one way of achieving that is by "bootstrapping" from understanding of video, If an understanding of what a human does in the video (standing, sitting, limb positions, height, facial expression) in relation to objects and other humans can be automatically inferred, a predictive model could be built with enough data of what a person in any given situation might do. Combine this with robust speech recognition and understanding of the behaviour of common objects I think you would be closer to cracking the goal of language understanding (which I think defines true human level intelligence).
if you want to attack free markets, why not go further and advocate barriers on inter-state commerce within the US.