“The U.S., over time, began to stop having as many vocational skills.”
It wasn’t a valid point; Americans could no longer make a living at those jobs (either because they were sent overseas, or because wages fell too steeply). Red China didn’t produce factory workers to raise crops; they produce them because our factory jobs went over there - and our factory workers were idled. College might not be the answer, but investing time & money learning a formerly lucrative trade doesn’t make much sense either.
This would be akin to bemoaning the fact that American students don’t study cost accounting anymore; it was tailored primarily for a manufacturing environment, and that work left with those jobs. If the owners of those closed factories complained about the lack of cost accountants twenty years later, they’d rightly be mocked for it.
Cook & Co. CAUSED THIS.
It's a matter of historical record that Apple was one of the last to move its manufacturing to China. They stood fast as long as they could until regulation and competition cost forced them to close their Elk Grove California plant in 2003 or so and move. All other computer makers had moved well before Apple. I think the other hold out was Dell. They moved shortly before Apple.
I think the final straw was the change in California's Workers Compensation Laws right around then and the huge increases in costs.