Anyone who's been anywhere near higher ed in recent years knows that standards are declining, in general, though I think (think) that the good and conscientious students and teachers are still doing good work on each side of the relationship. Here is an interesting report confirming what is pretty apparent. 

The problem is complex but one important aspect is the expectation that most everybody should go to college, and that a college degree is the ticket to a good job. Neither of those is true, and one effect of the pretense that they are is a general reduction in seriousness and a devaluation of the credential, so that a BA is fast becoming what a high school diploma used to be.

I saw this coming thirty-five years ago when I spent a miserable few weeks trying to teach remedial writing to college freshmen. I found myself introducing concepts such as "sentence" and "paragraph" to people who were taking college classes.  I don't know how many of them graduated with little improvement in their writing skills.