See the problem here?
Failing to teach a student ≠> the student is mediocre.
The student is mediocre ≠ the student is irredeemable and didn’t deserve an education in the first place.
Honestly, it’s wild to me how reluctant people are to accept that teachers have a responsibility to teach their students.
They will charge you $2000 a credit hour to have a teacher teach you — as if the teacher alone is the gatekeeper of an education — and then claim that the teacher is not in any way responsible for the student’s success or failure in being taught.
A portion of the educator's role is weeding out students who are not wanting/able to engage with the material before they spend a massive amount of time and money towards stepping stone classes to something they won't try/be able to complete. A portion of the student's role is weeding out the teachers and institutions which are more interested in maximizing the money out of the student instead of teaching them well. The two weeding processes actually reinforce the right outcome together - students getting educated instead of wasting their resources.
The reality is that prestigious universities routinely take money from incredibly talented people who are fully capable of learning calculus with or without a good teacher, the university gives them a careless or actively harmful teacher, and then the student is deemed a “weed” that was rightfully put in their proper place.
When you look at it this way, it’s clear that people are being scammed. Maybe that’s why universities are so reluctant to accept accountability for their teaching quality, blaming the students first and foremost.
Again, weeding does and needs to happen on both sides because there is more than one type of reason students fail to learn. That is in no way the same thing as saying it's never the teacher's fault, it's saying there are reasons to weed out for all that need to participate properly who aren't. No amount of money exchange changes that education is a two way street in effort.