There is not too much in between. That is the long-term trend. The challenge for society is to make sure that as many workers as possible get into the high value added category of symbolic-analytic work and also that the productivity of local service workers is as high as possible. A check-out clerk at a grocery store, sitting behind a computer, who is able to look at data on the merchandise coming out of the store and use the data to control inventory can be a highly valued employee and summon a relatively high wage. Indeed, higher education in North America is far more successful than higher education in Japan.
Japanese universities are jokes.
There's very little that goes on inside them. Were I to suggest changes in higher education in North America, I would emphasize more generic forms of learning rather than specific preoccupational skills. I worry sometimes that those preprofessional curricula are a bit too narrowly defined. The skills people need to develop have to do with problem solving and identification, developing critical facilities, understanding the value of experimentation, and the ability to collaborate. In other words, given that economies are changing so rapidly, the most valuable skills someone can acquire are the skills to learn rapidly and efficiently and to go into almost any situation and figure out what has to be learned.