Academic achievement-educated or not educated

The United States education produces largest college-educated pool of workers in the world, but educates many more people in the liberal arts and professions such as education, accounting than it does engineers, scientists and other specialized fields needed for research and development for producing either old or new products. Since high-wage manufacturing tends to based on engineering expertise and expanding high-tech industries it appears the quality of educators and the curriculums they design and teach have direct influence on economic technology.

Countries compete economically on being the lowest cost producer of different goods and services and if the education process isn’t producing inferior academic achievement lacking ability to be there doing specialized job skills of expanding high-tech industries there needs a change in the secondary-education system that gives increased academic achievement in reading comprehension, technical writing, and mathematics.

Colleges and Universities pump-out white-collar managing support staff, new commissioned military officers, and those having professional political ambitions. Each graduate is in principle expected to have the knowledge to make decisions and gets higher pay and responsibilities as a result. Eventually as work experience is gained these graduates become the selection pool of the next generation of top level bosses, decision makers, and elected office holders.

My question:

It appears happenings of scandal, criminal mischief, and criminal wrong doing is increasingly involving respected powerful business managers, influential honorable elected office holders, and higher rank military commissioned officers, is something systematically wrong or lacking in curriculums or perhaps it is the moral competence of educators a direct contributing cause for this trend?

Achieving a good education, is it possible when focused on providing vocational specialization?

Baccalaureate academics is become more focused on vocational specialization in a field for purpose of the student earning a living and getting the higher paying work rather than education having something to do with being a progressive activity resulting in the ability to do several other kinds of work rather than the kind they where trained to do.

The institutions of education throw young developing minds together to work, play, and organize themselves with minimal compulsorily exploration and discovery having purpose of building and establishing rational foundations for good physical, moral, and social behavior. The phenomenon of getting an education has become more partying and being fun than being concerned with the quality of the educating. A baccalaureate degree from any college or university has become no better than from another and even more discouraging the difference between educated and uneducated is becoming harder to distinguish in the work place or for that matter in the politicians holding and trying to hold elected office.

High academic achievement focusing only on pure vocational training lacks sufficient inclusion (if any at all) of continuous education in the social, moral, and scientific contexts within which wisely administered callings and professions must function. Education should not cause social reform through propaganda and popular myth but rather by exposing minds to ideas and knowledge in a way that develops critical thinking skills needed to have autonomy. Becoming autonomous requires self-mastery and self-direction.

Education has become so diluted of required curriculum having standards students have analysis, synthesis, and evaluation ability of subjects studied that many graduates from respectable colleges and universities are ill-equipped to understand much of anything above the level of a comic book without the use of Cliffs Notes. From my observations in the workplace many who have had the benefit of formal education acquired a significant combination of misinformation, little or no exposure to studies of philosophy, and reinforcement of many slipshod study and work habits.

So my questions are:

Is there decay of formal education?

If there is decay, is the increasingly allowing educators to dodge and neglect their responsibilities and duties to develop and sustain curriculums that provide a quality education a symptom of the decay or a direct contributing cause of the decay?