> They don't get paid more for getting more students, or if more students pass. Normally people go to public universities, which are pretty good, and their teachers have more or less a fixed salary.

There's no way you can generalise about incentive structures like that for an entire continent.

In my country, only public universities exist and the incentive structure is decided politically. Currently, universities get paid a certain amount for each student that graduates, but they are also deducted some set amount if the student doesn't graduate within a specific amount of time. In addition to that, the sum of money gained from a single STEM student is double that of another kind of student, so the universities have quite clear incentives to promote their STEM degrees.

Obviously, an incentive structure based solely on passing students must also inspire grade inflation. The current structure highly incentivises making STEM degrees easy to obtain. Whether that's actually the case, I can't say, but the structure certainly encourages it.