Universities are in a very sorry state, from my POV. I approached university as this place of growth and incubator of ideas, and that's pushed to you in the ads, but from my experience at two universities (one Go8) is very different.

When I watch publicly available lectures from the US, they tend to be natural and free-flowing, it feels like a one-sided conversation where the aim is to impart holistic understanding. At Australian universities, students know that the lecturers are simple dispensers of 'key points' and 'methods of solving x problem', and everything of value can be gleaned by watching the recording at double speed. Many lecturers spend the bulk of their time on these testable algorithms with only a cursory, token explanation for why/how it works, and the few that do the opposite often stand out immediately and people notably find their courses a lot harder as they test on understanding rather than following a clear procedure. Students are trained to pick up on the pieces of knowledge they're expected to, jump through the hoops, and promptly forget most of what they learned when they graduate. The lecturers' side of the bargain is to make the tests predictably conforming with the problem sets shown in the lecture (many often show past exams where only the specifics to the problem will change) and for the average mark to be somewhere around 70%. I've had the latter explicitly told to me by several lecturers - you really cannot fail unless you didn't even try.

University has absolutely become a product and many students approach it like a transaction, where if you jump through the hoops, you can expect to walk out in 3-4 years time with your piece of paper.