Re: Peer reviewers eh? What are they like?
Don't blame the quality of writing on the schools. Academic publishing has pushed towards new boundaries of fast-turnaround, formulaic, vacuous, crap. During my PhD about a decade ago I remember trying to write a simple MATLAB script to create crappy-but-believable abstracts. I never quite got it to work in the couple of wasted afternoons trying. Personally, I am surprised that the AI only managed to fool people 32% of the time.
Peer review is not what so much of the public think it is: Academics reproducing the work. You are given 2-4 weeks to read and comment on a long paper draft, as extra, unpaid, uncredited work on top of a busy schedule. You skim read it looking for obvious errors and omissions. After that you make a snap judgment about how interesting it is. The more surprising the result, the more interesting it is. The more interesting, the better the paper will tend to do. Of course the more surprising results are more likely to turn out to be wrong, so never trust anything published in a Nature Journal. Still, the highlight of my career.... getting something published in a Nature journal.
The only way out of the endless cycle is for everyone to stand up to the journals, funders, and promotion boards that push bibliometrics based on publication statistics. Doing it alone is the death of your career. Getting academics to do it in unison is like herding cats into a bath.