Certainly, high profile/cost courses with lots of interest in teaching them are, but the big money makers such as con-ed, distance learning and apprenticeship take the most convenient person available and throw them in, often at the last minute with zero preparation.
I don't see how this differs from ureddit.
$80,000 waste of time versus a much cheaper but still waste of time?
AFAIK, they don't. There was a big fiasco recently when some guy who was teaching a C++ course was featured as "course of the week" or something, which got posted to /r/programming, and they basically tore him to shreds.
A lot of people were claiming that some of the problems were nit-picky, but there were certainly some significant issues with the code. It was the sort of stuff that someone who read C++ Primer probably wouldn't do, but someone who read "How To Program C++ in 21 Days for Dummies: the Absolute Moron's Guide" might.
The presentation was pretty terrible too, but that doesn't necessarily speak towards whether he knows what he's talking about.
EDIT: Here's the thread http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/197dn1/introduc...