To Boognish: as an old prof I agree with all of those sentiments. To add some on-the-ground reality context, though --- I taught at Western Michigan University for decades. As a state school, and as a lower choice than UofM and MSU, we more or less needed to accept whoever applied. (We were BIG -- ~25,000 or up most years.) So what happened in the classroom? The freshman class turned out to be composed of everyone who was somewhere in the top two-thirds (occasionally lower) of their high school classes or even lower if they had a friendly school advisor or were on some "program." These included some fine students, but it included a BIG number of people who wanted a year away from Mom and Dad at a place they could go pretty wild. One year and out. (a little more if parents were wealthy and dumb, and the first courses were carefully picked, or cheating went on.)
So, I was a teaching excellence award winner who taught general science to those freshman as part of my job. I wasn't THAT hard on them. I sculpted the auditorium sized class (the 150-200 student one/ the one we had to provide to seat the masses) so that a simply decent student who took notes and was mentally involved could pass (because I was sort of spectacular with the content, way over half the class was in the B&up range.) BUT A FULL 25% OF EVERY CLASS FLAT FAILED. They didn't even show up after about the first two weeks (ths despite the class being in the top ten STUDENT-rated on campus.) They had "better things to do."
So, depending upon the pressure to accept certain students in the first place and the reputation of the school as a "good time" in the high school system and being a state school, you were forced to accept some of the still-utterly-stupid group. So you can have a school with LOTS of opportunity for academic excellence and lots of drunken flunk-outs. The 75% of my students I would be happy to recommend as good hires and neighbors. The 25%? They, frankly, at that time of their lives, were bums in the system. (Some of the excuses I heard to try to skip the work were over-the-top TV sitcom material.)