> The quality varied wildly depending on the department.

I feel like it has always been this way. I went to a small private university. The natural sciences and especially the pre-med students had their days fully packed, like the only time you could even have a moment to talk about anything was at the cafeteria during meals.

Then there was the business department. The college athletes apparently picked business as a major because you have to pick something. You couldn't guess what was their preferred minor and why... The overwhelming preferred minor was music because the buildings for department of business and music were adjacent.

Compare that to the pre meds who were always worried about getting a B and somehow "ruining their chances at med school".

> The college athletes apparently picked business as a major because you have to pick something.

I actually think it makes a lot of sense to go for some kind of basic business degree if you're angling to go into professional sports. Having some basic concepts of basic business law, finance, etc. seems pretty important for someone looking to shop their abilities and likeness around and have some understanding of the contract negotiations they'll hopefully be a part of. Outside of the gym its probably the most relevant kind of skills being taught on a college campus for that career path.

I feel like the prevailing story you would hear “back in the day” was always the star quarterback or the kid of a rich donor getting white-glove treatment. Instead my experience matched GP, handful of students complaining that a tree-balancing exercise is “too harsh” and getting the entire assignment slashed by the professor being pressed to increase the size of the department.

I must be old (I am) because I have never seen a professor change an assignment based on student feedback on how hard the assignment was.

I guess this sort of thing explains the drastic dip in quality in the jr engineers lately that I noticed.

As an instructor, what do you do if 1/2 of the class lacks the pre-requisites for the material.

'give them an F' sounds good. But that impacts a lot of people.

What you need to do is move the material down a bit. Within reason.

> That's the big thing - the college might be dropping the first semester grades so they can squeeze a second semester of tuition out of kids.

This seems most likely. If you think of college as yet another extractive business (and you can bet the administrators at colleges think this way), then students that drop out are simply cu$tomers you are failing to retain: Pure lost revenue.

> ... squeeze a second semester of tuition out of kids.

Propitiated, in many cases, by the unnoticed run-up of their student loan debt balance.