Universities should not be vocational and neither should high schools, IMO, but for some reason in the US the idea of purely vocational education is taboo. So

Universities should not be vocational and neither should high schools, IMO, but for some reason in the US the idea of purely vocational education is taboo. So the two get mashed together and you get this tension between the lofty notions of a liberal education and the need to make a living. Separating people who want to build car engines from people who want a liberal education at the secondary level is seen as a sort of elitism.