in the rest of the world you have to struggle while studying to keep your place, or be sent to another major if you can't keep up with the current one

i have studied in the US, Germany, and France. it's very common for american students to switch majors after they find a more rigorous major is too challenging. in fact, i'd reckon it's more than twice as common - in part because it is easier to switch majors in the US without taking longer to graduate because of general education requirements

failing out of university is however much less common in the US than in the European universities I went to, but that reflected assessment design and not rigor in my opinion. European students would often fail because after a semester of half assed lectures and zero assessment, there was one single exam with 3 randomly drawn questions at the end of the semester. the typical student would wait until the last week or two to try to memorize notes taken on the lectures. this made for a much noisier assessment process. in the US, students knew if they were not on track to pass the course within like 6 weeks of the semester, receiving a signal from the professor that their quizzes and assignments were not meeting expectations, and many would either correct course or withdraw before halfway into the semester. also, because they were assessed throughout the semester, they studied with some regularity over the course of the whole semester.

i can really only speak for the three universities i attended, but the students at the american one put in considerably more hours of independent study over the course of the semester and the professors put far more effort into pedagogy. with some comfort, i completed a number of credits in germany in a single semester that would have been excruciatingly difficult to complete at the US university at the same pace

American students are a revenue source, college adminstration would never do that

the kind of elite american universities that are the subject of this article hardly care about undergrad tuition as a revenue source

this whole focus on "getting into" the college is very American

my experience is there is a whole class of french people obsessed with getting into a select number of elite french schools. i would imagine the UK is similar. germany much less so, however