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The mechanical process explains why college degrees are increasingly common and the floor has crawled up; it doesn't explain why these groups take thousands of dollars a credit-hour and can't teach, and that's the part that's really damning. Yes, presumably some level of penetration of degrees means you'd be trying to teach people to learn who are constitutionally incapable of it, and there's some degree of capability or intelligence required to achieve harder capabilities, no small amount of which I recognize I don't have and may never have.
But then we get english majors that can't write a clear paragraph to save their lives, electronics engineers who've never touched a standalone transistor, so on. The old joke was that modern colleges were training people to become underwater basket weavers, but in the modern day, it's not clear they could do that. These aren't 140 IQ problems.
Nor does it explain the collapse for academics. These are supposed to be the people who care, and have focused, and been selected from the just-doing-it people.
I'm trying to write up the PubPeer equivalent of that big screed I had about the ballistics gel study a couple days ago, avoiding the political side of things, and focusing on just the typos and measurement results and non-reproducable output values and disclosure failures and clearly incorrect models, and it's longer than the culture war screed here! I keep finding new problems just trying to write the old ones in full detail. A good many are independent of the actual political disagreement, and a couple even undermine the political goal (if only by accident). And there's supposedly six adults working hard on this paper over a period of five years!
They made the decision that no one was going to look at their analysis with a skeptical eye. Tbf, that was a reasonable decision. But that says quite a lot about their entire ecosystem.
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