I feel that stricter systems like this require an extremely homogeneous society to work. Everyone has to be on the ball, educating the kids from a young age.

I feel that stricter systems like this require an extremely homogeneous society to work. Everyone has to be on the ball, educating the kids from a young age. This includes both the actual education of things they learn, as well as instilling the values of respect for learning and education. When you have a fragmented society it feels like it's hard to fix the low performers at the college level, and even having a much stricter and/or free system would not help without a huge upstream culture change. I don't know what the solution is (US-centric). Push the education and values as widely as possible relentlesly, hoping to get a positive first derivative, and maybe in 50 years things will be better?