It’s certainly harder to get into any of our courses than it was when I studied there… Much more competition for places, 20% up for us from last year. I don’t know how universal that is, I’ve got a bit of paper on my desk at work that’d tell me but I wasn’t paying attention 🙄
Once you’re in… I can only speak for scottish unis but the independant and internal assessments I’ve seen all say much the same thing- that the subjects are as hard and that the degrees are as valuable, but that it’s often a little easier to complete a degree just because of improvements in teaching methods and learning resources. Also that there are more efforts to keep people in a course once they’re in.
I’ll give you an example there, we switched from a 3-term to a 2-semester teaching structure. No changes in overall course objectives and only minor changes in subjects. Across the uni we saw improvements in grades the following year, but obviously not because of dumbing down, just because it’s a better way to teach.