'Good' students learn well by sitting in a large lecture and doing homework. Getting a number back on a homework assignment is sufficient feedback for students to learn from their mistakes. Every student's knowledge is equally evaluatable by exams. Student success in a class can be meaningfully categorized into a single letter grade. Students all have the appropriate prerequisite knowledge and remember it well. Students can all grasp the material at about the same rate, and certainly within one semester. Students feel comfortable talking one on one to professors or TAs during office hours. Certainly this works well enough for many students. But it absolutely does not work for many others who are otherwise bright, capable individuals. Some people have extenuating personal circumstances — family that need support, relationship troubles, kids, poverty. An increasing number of people have anxiety problems. A lot of people have not had a good pre-college education to draw on and struggle to make that up whilst 'good' students get better grades because they had a better upbringing. I think some of the best learning I've done is sitting down with a friend or two and a book and working through it at our own pace until we're satisfied we know what's going on. No exams, no answer key — we do the exercises and discuss our approaches until we agree on what 'the' answer is.
Long has it been known that standardized education mostly exists to provide a uniform experience to better mold a disparate populace into a uniform workforce. Over the past 50 years that workforce has come to require a four-year degree; as a consequence the uniformity of experience has extended to college. I dunno, man. I spent a year amongst the proletariat teens of This Modern America and fuckin' hell the amount of handholding was just appalling. People with translators following them around. People with state-mandated guidance counselors following them around. People with ADHD headbands. We've agreed as a culture that everyone gets college, we've agreed that we're all fucked without college degrees, so we've agreed as a culture that we'll do whatever it takes to get people through 180 credits come hell or high water and the whole stupid artifice is a sham. There was a time when bright, capable individuals could find something useful to do without writing 15 essays on Dickens but that time has largely passed. As a consequence we've created a patently preposterous structure to get people over the hump of education they never needed in the first place.