Plenty of US workers work in factories. They're churning out immense amounts of software. Some examples of this type of factory are Alphabet, Meta, and Microso

Plenty of US workers work in factories. They're churning out immense amounts of software. Some examples of this type of factory are Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft. Other people work in other types of factories - like music studios, where they churn out music that gets billions of streams. Singling out a specific type of production as this article does requires blinding oneself to all the other types of production happening in an economy. Assembly lines needed tremendous amounts of people to do essentially the same job, thus making the whole economy simpler to try to keep in your head at once. Today a tremendous breadth of goods are being produced so it's harder to see, but the opportunities are there - they just don't all look the same like in the very short era when factories dominated employment. The article (unintentionally I am sure) commits a fallacy of quoting absolute numbers of university graduates without providing comparisons (eg. population size differences between US and China). Even if the US produces fewer factory-capable workers per capita, modern factories manufacturing goods require less people to do the same thing thanks to automation, so there's not the same need to churn out people to work in them. Hence higher education is geared toward providing more diverse skills in the US than in China.