It's somewhat like what we do to airlines. When air travel was expensive, couch seats were comfortable, silverware was made of metals, glasses, of glass and real food was served in long-duration flights.

We put pressures on them to lower prices and they responded by packing passenger in as little space as medically safe and by serving the most lightweight food that will keep you alive during the flight.

We turned airlines into people movers just like we are turning universities into degree mills.

The standards are being lowered for several reasons. One is that the university gets paid per student they graduate (in most countries in Western Europe that I know about). Another is that politicians feel they need to raise the % of people with degrees in their region/country so they pressure universities to 'accommodate' students as much as possible. Couple this with top positions in universities increasingly being given to non-academics, but rather bureaucrat politicians who get these positions as a reward for years of service to their party and in these roles fill the last few years until their retirement with a cushy, well paid job in which they mostly try to run the university as a company (not being hindered by the fact that they know nothing about actually running a business), and you get every lower academic standards.

And then finally, and this may not be the majority of cases but I've seen this happen from very close myself, a part of the problem is the many exchange students who come from developing countries and pay big bucks for their studies. These people have sometimes scraped together everything they and their extended families have to go to the West. If they fail their program, to them it feels like they might as well have been executed on the spot. There's no way they can go back to their countries without a degree. I've seen people on the brink of suicide over the thought of failing exams and having to go back (yes, other ('native') students also get exam anxiety, I'm not dismissing those).

So imagine being a professor and having to grade a thesis of a guy that is only a few years younger than you are (these students often come after several years of working and saving), with a wife and a family to support. You know he doesn't live up to the standards of the program. You also know that everybody else knows (academics at universities in the area) so nobody's going to give him a postdoc anyway. So there's no real harm in giving him the degree, at least not until 'the work gets out' and all diplomas devaluated. The student will most likely be going back to where he came from, where he's going to be welcomed as a genius and offered a cushy government or consulting job. All in all, there he's still going to be quite good, at least compared to the other people at the places that would hire him (yes there are very bright Indian, Chinese etc. students who are just as good as any Western student, I'm not disparaging Asians in general - I'm talking about this specific subset of 'academic refugee students').

And then consider that if you fail this guy, you know you're basically doing the equivalent of a 'thumbs down' in a Roman amphitheater. That's a tough decision to make. I know, this sort of factors shouldn't come into play, but that's easy to say from behind a desk far far away from this situation. I've seen people seriously struggle with this dilemma, and I've seen choices being made in both directions. It's heart wrenching, and it makes people think several times before accepting a next student who may turn out this way.

nope. we have standards and requirements for very good reasons. but we don't want anyone to ever experience a negative feeling.