Universities should be more than toll gates

For private universities in Europe it is true. For public (state owned) universities much less so. This is simply because public university does not look on student like on a customer who put some good money on the table to get the final paper. While private universities do.

This is also a reason why in Europe when you have a diploma from private university, nobody really takes that seriously and looks at you like you would be showing him diploma from University of McDonalds.

Yup - I'm Polish, and vast majority of people faced with a diploma from private university would think "You bought your degree because you were too dumb to get into public university."

There are some good private ones; but most of them are degree mills.

> This is simply because public university does not look on student like on a customer who put some good money on the table to get the final paper.

Even 10 years ago, this used to be the case in Poland. But now, with demographic decline (current generation of students significantly smaller than previous ones), universities are desperate to fill the seats. If they don't, they lose public funding, which means layoffs - and no one wants that (the university, as any institution, first and foremost serves its employees).

One approach used is to attract foreigners (mostly students from Asia and, to lesser degree, Africa - the main draw is the EU visa), another one is to keep lowering expectations.

Yes, German universities don't do entrance exams, there is also no grading on a curve to artificially weed out students. What they do instead is just simply have really difficult exams with a failure rate of 30% and higher for first semester students. The linear algebra exam I passed had a 50% failure rate and most passing students got something equivalent to a D in the American system.

To be fair: if you're doing a Masters degree the grade you end up getting on your Bachelors degree is pretty unimportant and Masters usually isn't graded that harshly.

But yeah, we had exams with 70% failing.