This seems rather odd to me. The article hammers on about manufacturing jobs while it has been reported that manufacturing ethos in other countries is better than the USA making it a really bad choice to manufacture there. It costs more, and you get less.
At the same time, this seems to be suggesting that anyone could be doing a trade school type of education instead of college, while to me it seems that is is the lower entry into any form of education. If college equals trade school, then college in the USA needs to up it's game.
Learning a trade is only useful up to a point. As others have posted, there is no point in having 100 million machinists all being very capable of re-manufacturing tower crane gearboxes. Even a million would not make any sense. There is also a limit to what you can do with your time. While you don't need to be a millionaire to be happy, the limit to what you can earn is comparatively low when you are working at the practical side of things vs. what steering/planning/administrating and up can earn.
This does not mean that trade school is by definition 'stupid' and if you don't go to college or university (or is that the same in the USA?) you are therefore not smart, but it does limit your capabilities, at least in terms of growth. Now, if you are comfortable with a trade, if it gets you what you want, there would be no point in going to college. At the same time, if college is too hard, and learning beyond basic literacy and mathematics is not an option, you might be stuck at trade level.
One of the bigger problems with 'trade' or 'labour' type of skill is that it often is very limited in abstracted transferrable knowlegde. What if the way some thing are done are replaced. Say you are very good at cleaning chimneys, that's great, but nobody needs your skills. Or what if you are very good at shining shoes. Or driving horse carriages. Or digging holes and putting down outhouses. This is the same for most of the current trade type of work, it is only useful as long as people need you, and when they don't you can't really go do something else because you don't have the theory behind what you were doing to re-implement it somewhere else.