Academic training promotes uniformity. You are trained to excel in the manner the professors, your colleagues, or the industry deems it. If its all subjective it cannot be graded, so a baseline standard has to be established and thereby robbing it of individuality little by little.

So if the idea of ugly art has become the standard, then all those being trained will create ugly art.

As webcomics and cartoons are some of the easiest fields to break into, and require speedy production over painstaking detail, I'd imagine CalArts type garbage are shoveled to help students get careers directly from graduation (a very important metric for many schools to help curb the "garbage degree" reputation).