it's even worse than that. they aren't smart or good at test taking, but they have the support of a partner or family to just keep showing up and covering tuition. because many programs are worried about austerity, they have to keep their matriculation:graduation rates up to attract applicants and not become the focus of The Chop. i have had friends tell me horror stories of being forced to pass literal already-warned-once plagarizing idiots in graduate school by a department chair and the director of the program, because a fail/removal "doesn't look good."

working in The Academy with/for PhDs to meet grant obligations in research and service (while picking up my own graduate degree) absolutely obliterated any default level of respect i used to have for the highly credentialed in the US. some of most uncritical, unthinking, and brain dead fuckers on the planet. it is certainly not all of them, but in my experience credentials and critical thinking skills are not correlated.

when i read about the cultural revolution in china and its reforms of higher education, all i could think was, "i can think of a dozen 'public intellectuals' that need to be publicly humiliated."