>>15Students no longer go to college to learn. They go there to get a diploma in order to get a better job. This feeds on itself: the more people going to college just for a diploma, the less value a diploma has, the more one needs a diploma to be competitive, etc.. And universities absolutely love this, because more students means more money. Of course, universities not wanting to lose students leads to grade inflation leads to students getting by without learning the basics leads to it being easier to get a diploma leads to ....
And absolutely jack shit can be done. If you fail a bunch of students because they did not demonstrate even rudimentary knowledge of the course material, the administration is on your ass as soon as you submit grades. You can't even fail a student for cheating on an exam unless you want to go through a drawn-out battle against the administration that you will probably lose.