Then you would have lost your mind during some of my upper division STEM courses, where the normal class average is in the mid 40% on the high end and high 30s most semesters. We had a class average of ~83% in one of them, and when the professor was in total disbelief about how blatant they were being (several didn't even try not to get 100%) he got upset and decided to stop re-using the previous year's exams that were circulating amongst the Frats/Sororities and the class average dropped back down to low 30% for the last 2 Midterms and finals. This personally helped me as I got my average to a B+ range after my Lab scores were included.

Academia, be it online of IRL, it always going to have that element of corruption, there has just been so much money to be made that it drew the worst from other sectors into its administrations. Eric Weinstein goes into the depth about the artificial scarcity within STEM that was created in the US to favour a 'race to the bottom' approach to wages since the the 90s, and he went to both MIT and Harvard!

My best professors were often disillusioned and jaded after having been in Academia for a few decades, one even having to petition and protest to the Dean of their departments to be paid for having taught back to back Summer courses during the budget cuts. A person who went to Oxford for his BSc, no less...

All of this is taking place while hearing about some high ranking official or executive is in the process of being disgraced for having plagiarized their Masters or PhD thesis decades ago, which begs the question how the hell did it pass back then? Don't they all have to go through dissertations defenses and have academic advisors who are PhD or Post Docs in the very same department?

I won't even talk about the administrative led favoritism and vetting they did for foreign students during my time there, either.

I'm a proponent of of Online Learning in general, especially as its disrupting the Brick and Mortar University exploitation model; you can now get a Masters in Electrical Engineering from CU Boulder entirely via Coursera for $20k with installments and Financial Aid available where applicable, whereas that's not even the total cost of a single year of Undergraduate studies there. Which really sucks for incoming students, but could be a net boon if they can start reaching the undergrad degrees in time now that most Universities are having to do that due to COVID.

I just think its worth keeping in mind that this institution (academia) doesn't deserve to be regarded anything more than the corrupt money-pit that it is, which occasionally avails itself to allow brilliant minds to excel in their field, after having exploited them to publish and use their labs until the can make a name for themselves and operate outside of it. I just think about the wasted Human capital, talent, and drive that you only have when you're young, naive and idealistic and determined to make make a difference in the World.