None of the incentives line up in a remotely rational way in academia. It's a large-scale boondoggle. Gullible young adults take on tens or hundreds of thousan

None of the incentives line up in a remotely rational way in academia. It's a large-scale boondoggle. Gullible young adults take on tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of non-dischargeable loans, ostensibly in pursuit of either knowledge or certification. Most achieve neither, leaving severely indebted with (maybe) a few solid drinking buddies. The liberal arts professors, themselves the small subset who did pursue knowledge but have now discovered the market for esoterica is vanishingly small, attempt to eke out a living by doubling down on their wasted time. They produce documents only a tiny minority of their peers (or the next round of dupes/students) will ever read, desperately hoping thereby to secure one of a tiny number of available tenured positions, succeeding in the equivalent of a Ponzi scheme measured in hours, not dollars. Professors in science or technology fields, having failed to find another model to subsidize basic research, endure the tedium of teaching hungover classes of mediocre minds, genuinely convinced that a breakthrough discovery might be just over the horizon, finally legitimizing their single-minded focus over decades. Both sets of professors prop up the "peer-reviewed journal" scam, which has somehow convinced people that such publications indicate intellectual or academic merit, despite failing every reliability test anyone has attempted. And then, for good measure, there are also...administrators and athletic teams, for some reason. I can't even figure out what the incentive is for administrators, nor can I understand why a university athletic system makes more financial sense than a minor league system, except maybe as a publicity stunt for the whole apparatus? In the end, I can't actually think of anyone in the system who does seem to be getting what they want from the arrangement. Let it crumble.