This is easily bypassed by having “college” programs that are literally just puppy mills for cops.

We just call them Police Academies.

Most of the people I worked with in that career field had “degrees” from online programs or schools in the middle of fucking nowhere

There's definitely an attitude that the small town and community colleges are just diploma mills for local schmucks. And that degree inflation has made them a kind of young person tax on the way to earning a decent salary.

But I do recoil a bit at the notion smaller schools and "hand-holding" curriculum somehow don't produce more educated people than the post-high school educational sucking sound of service sector/blue collar employment. That you need to be in a weed out course in order to prove you retained information. Or that TAs aren't there to hand-hold students who are stuggling in a subject and only exist to fuck you over arbitrarily.

The idea that education needs to be painful or stressful in order to be useful produces a lot of schools with obscene drop out rates and - let's be frank - suicides to get you to a place that a slower pace, more generous grading curves, and smaller class sizes with more attentive teachers could easily avoid.

That's not to defend cops, of course. But it seems absurd to suggest the product of a more casual and cheerful time in college is hordes of glass-chewing thumb-headed fascist psychopaths.