The only way to keep standards high is to cease using degrees solely as class indicators and stop requiring a bachelor's degree for the overwhelming majority of white collar jobs (that we all know don't need the specific knowledge from the degree or else the required degree would be more specific, and that we also know the degree doesn't indicate work ethic necessarily, go look at the people working much harder precisely because they don't have a degree, if anything the degree serves as a license to slack off like the upper class so).

Otherwise the potential downside of not graduating with at least a bachelor's degree is so devastating that the population (who don't want to be perpetually responsible for their adult children that have been made unemployable in any decent capacity for no reason other than to make certain email job people feel important) will accept nothing less than a pass rate approaching ever closer to 100%.

If you want to make education rigorous, you have to address that problem and then also try to address the K-12 education system that faces a similar but more extreme version of the same issue (because not being able to properly read and write are genuinely bad indicators for the majority of white collar jobs, and failing to graduate high school tends to indicate fundamental issues in that respect moreso than failing to graduate with a bachelor's, which usually just indicates immaturity / lack of money / boredom / a million other things that don't imply missing fundamental skills).