It's threatening to the dummies. They are threatened by people with education. The ones most threatened by the fact I was studying and then had a degree were the ones with the least education: the ones who dropped out in year 9 (one year before Australia's first school exit point). We had an elder in one cong I was in, an elder friend of mine who has his MBA and his wife, also a pioneer with him, was doing her degree in accounting. He didn't mind two straws if someone wanted to go to uni because he was educated himself and saw the benefits of it. He and his wife being able to earn $70- $100 an hour meant they could pioneer in comfort without leaching off others. He certainly wasn't going to be threatened by someone going to uni. It was always the ones who'd never finished high school who were most vocal about education.
Funnily enough, it was also those ones who bleated the most about the evils of the university environment. I would calmly say, "Oh, which university did you go to?" and they would always say, "Um, I've never been..." which made my point exactly. However the ones who'd been never ran it down and went on about how evil it was.