Discouraging higher education, IMO, isn't a bad thing. Academia is too much of a walled garden that is too easy to enter.
This resulted in higher ed becoming a defacto requirement for many professions that could have been open to professionally trained or experienced people. Employers need to draw their baseline requirements somewhere and if expensive credentials are too ubiquitous, it's understandable they rather select from those who achieved them than from those who didn't (or couldn't afford to).
And it's frankly disgusting how many doors remain closed to yourself unless you got access to an .edu email. More people with academic interests not having acquired one might open the door to many more who discovered their academic interests later in life but can no longer find a way to enter that garden.
There's no point in being able to buy an outrageously fancy toilet with remittances if there's no sewer to hook it up to.