This is career advice, not anti-intellectualism. With the rising cost of schools that leave so many in debt bondage University has risks. If you pick a field of study that you find rewarding but the jobs associated crush your soul or if there is no job then you end up in fantastic amounts of debt that unlike other debt cannot be forgiven. A lot of education via a university route is padded or inflated with requirements for the degree that do not add to one’s meaningful body of knowledge but exist to line the pockets of the institutions.

None of this is to say that one shouldn’t pursue knowledge, university is not the only route toward intellectualism. Being in trades does not stop one from learning from other resources. Autodiadactism is on the rise. What people are against is a predatory system of for profit post secondary education.

Misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and other forms of bigotry are also not inherent in blue collar positions by default. It more depends on your geographical location and crew in either situation because the more culturally normal it is in a given city to be queer or how many women are hired in a work place change those workplaces. As a trans person I have worked a number of blue collar jobs that compared to trans friends of mine in whitecollar positions have been more universally accepting of my identity. A number of my co-workers in those construction jobs are also damn near always in classes of some variety, sometimes in accredited institutions but not always. We are all in situations where the job market and personal survival pushes us to the practicality of going where the money is for work but not allowing ourselves to be entirely defined by our jobs. Sometimes the blue collar positions are very meaningful. They are often tied in to incredibly basic facets of quality of life, helping people be properly sheltered, hygenic and comfortable or improving communities through infrastructure.

Your post in some ways comes across as a bit elitist as though white collar positions demanding high levels of acreditied education are more valid than blue collar ones. We should be looking to support blue collar positions as not failure states and provide safety nets for the physical strain of those positions while offering workers chances to obtain education for education sake at reasonable cost to allow them career flexibility and personal enrichment while critiquing systems that place so great a financial burden on students.