In today's economy, advanced skills simply are a must. But it seems to me that the upper bound for the highly educated segment of the work force is 30% or so. I don't know what to do about the rest of the folks -- it does seem that increasingly they are just being left out of the economy, left out of the political process, and left out of society as the relatively affluent know it.
The U.S. is not the only country grappling with this. Globalization means that the unskilled work force in affluent countries has to compete with billions of people in third-world countries for whom a dollar or two a day represents unimagined riches. But the alternative has been shown to be even worse (see Depression, Great.)