One thing that never comes up in these debates is the GI bill. With a certain amount of service, OCS/ODS graduates can pass their benefits on to their kids. I have no idea how common that is to actually do, but I would imagine that it probably makes OCS less cheap in the long run than just a 12 week program.
As someone with some college teaching experience under my belt, I'd gladly trade all the academy cadets and mids that I've met for most of the students I've had to teach or TA/grade for. I went to a civilian undergrad with an honor code, and while people don't always follow it, the cheating culture I've seen in grad school while teaching undergrads sometimes blows my mind. Colleagues have had to do "detective work" to break up cheating rings, kids walk around on campus talking about how their roommate just gave them the answers, and so on. Students get away with lying and we are sometimes not encouraged to chase them down about it. When they are caught lying or cheating, they get a slap on the wrists and MIGHT be given an F in the course. That's it. And I don't believe they are ever punished for some of the off campus infractions that have come up in this thread, like a DUI.
Some have criticized the academies for not having enough instructors with doctorates or other issues along those lines. One benefit to the academies is that the sole job of every professor is to teach, as far as I can tell from friends and family who went to USAFA and USNA. At any other institution, the PhD toting professors are probably researchers and teach a few classes in between their time in the lab/dig site/archives/whatever. They have 1-3 office hours a week (in fact, this one comp sci prof I had used to have several 20 minute "office minutes" as I came to call them), academy profs get "most available" in some of the various college ranking guides out there. Profs at civilian colleges aren't always there to teach, they come there to do research and get it published - teaching just pays the bills when they don't have a grant. This is especially true in science and engineering, not quite as much in the humanities. To be fair, I have had and have worked with some really outstanding instructors who get accolades for their accomplishments in the lab and the classroom. Many of the instructors are graduate students, some of whom don't even have their master's degree done yet. I taught an upper level class at 23 that I had only taken about a year before when I was an undergrad. Although I received good reviews both times, I was basically given a course number and classroom and no other guidance or instruction. This is not unheard of in academia. You need more teaching/education credentials to be an assistant to a kindergarten teacher than to teach at a university. The PhD is an academic credential, not a teaching certificate.
Who do you want teaching your mids/cadets? Someone who is a few years older than the students and might not even have a master's degree, or a experienced officer who has the sole job of teaching the same course? My take-home message here is to say that the USNA prof is putting the civilian colleges and their students on a pedestal they don't deserve.