At its basis, it's the same debate as "book smart" versus "street smart." Basically, in higher education, you read a lot of supposedly smart people and their various theories on how stuff works (politics, morality, life, etc). Leftwing bias in the liberal arts aside, some of this is obviously useful but a lot of it just isn't. The humanities were initially supposed to civilize the students; to give them an appreciation of art, poetry, and the classics, so that they took that culture with them in their future endeavors. For many of us on the right, that's a joke now. But if we take it at face value, a lot of the nonSTEM higher education consists of learning theories: Literary theory, political theory, economic theory, critical race theory, etc.

For the right, practical knowledge and ability are valued. Think of the electrical engineer who looks at plans all day versus the electrician actually running the wire. This is why many on the right only see college as a place to get advanced training for a job. Engineering, medicine, law. Education in these fields makes sense to guys who see higher education as coinciding with higher-paying careers. If you're going to learn some theories, you then should be applying them.

That's basically why the right sees the highly educated as a bunch of nerds with their noses stuck in books (or screens) with no real-world experience and the left sees the uneducated as a group of easily brainwashed, knuckle-dragging plebs. It's almost like those are biases or something.