Academia has became an routine extension of school.

In school, you learn to fill in the blanks. In today's academia, you find the weakest and most useless subject, but the easiest to 'improve' on, and then manually fill in the blanks.

Of course there are exceptionally bright people in both places, but what used to happen was that academia consisted of much more of them proportionately. Now most everyone can put crap into graphene and observe the increase of electrocatalytic effect.