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Lack of rigor barely describes how bad modern university education is.
I recently started an online master's program for computer science through the University of Colorado (Boulder). The amount of difficult work and overall rigor in the courses has been, uh, lacking to say the least. My undergraduate degree is in a humanities related discipline and all of my CS knowledge is self-taught, just to give you some context.
All assignments except for the final exam in each class have unlimited attempts, which makes the multiple choice quiz assignments a joke. But even the actual programming assignments haven't been any serious work. So far I've finished the general networking and Linux networking classes, and the assignments have been things like:
Analyze some packet dumps and find the maximum amount of TCP datagrams that are in flight at any given point in the stream.
Create ethernet devices in 4 different containers, connect them to a bridge in a 5th container, then run this premade script to ping between them and submit the packet dump.
Modify half a dozen lines in a couple of BGP config files, then turn off some ethernet interfaces, ping between two endpoints, and submit a packet dump showing that your BGP config worked correctly after turning off the interfaces.
The finals have been worth 10% of the total grade in the general networking class and 20% in the Linux networking class, and you only need a B in the first three networking classes to be admitted into the full computer science program (where, as the saying goes, C's get degrees, at least for the elective courses that make up half of the degree; you still only need B's in the required breadth courses).
And this degree doesn't have a special "online" caveat attached to it, it will appear exactly the same to employers as a Computer Science master's obtained in person at CU Boulder.
It makes more sense when you realize that many master's programs are just busywork to justify a student visa and a follow-on graduate STEM OPT work permit (two years that can be converted to a green card or H1).
They are optimizing for the user experience of someone who wants the fastest, lowest effort way to get entry into the US white collar labor market, not actual learning.
Not just that, its also grade inflation where due to the erosion of standards and enforcement, 3 year bachelor degrees are often not enough for professional graduate intakes. Also some 'blue collar' positions now require college time (eg NYPD needs 24 semester credits / 1 year of college time), or a degree where it used to be trade school (nursing in some Western nations).
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Yeah, the only reason I'm in the program is because I want to boost my resume for future employment (especially since my undergrad degree isn't in a STEM field), and because my current employer is paying for it. I have actually learned some useful things from it, but only because I applied myself more than someone just looking to pass the class would need to. And everything I did learn from it I could have learned on my own without the program, the program just provided a minimal amount of guidance and direction as to what to learn.
I did find out I can take some electives from the electrical engineering master's program and have them count for my degree, so I'll probably do that since a lot of them seem more interesting (and hopefully more rigorous).
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