Yes. So the question is, "Are schools giving up their academic rigor, or just facing up to the reality that students aren't learning anything anyway?" My soft

Yes. So the question is, "Are schools giving up their academic rigor, or just facing up to the reality that students aren't learning anything anyway?" My soft anecdotal observation is... - At my large public undergrad, very little classroom learning happened for 80+% of the students outside the hard subjects. (Physics, Computer Science, etc) 80+% of the students in the hard subjects learned a lot in the class. Many students learned a lot outside of the classroom. - At my private research focused professional grad school, there was a lot more learning, but even then more of the learning was outside the classroom. It was also possible to treat the experience as a multi-year job interview, and do fine skating by with low grades.