They are paying for the education, but not for the degree, and they’re not paying to get a passing grade even if they do poorly.
I wouldn’t necessarily agree that we should just fail the students, clearly something is going on if the professor has to use a curve unexpectedly, but we shouldn’t just accept this as okay simply because they are paying.
I think we're all in agreement about what should be the case, but in practice I think the majority are buying a degree and don't care about learning beyond the minimum they need in order to earn or fake their way into a job. Look at how people are flocking to AI. The typical person wants a button to press to give them an answer or complete a task. Every day we see headlines about people carelessly accepting laughably wrong LLM output.
Film studies is kind of well known for being a vanity degree for rich people's kids. At least all the film studies students I know from India who're studying in the US are without exception the kids of super-rich businessmen and politicians.
The serious ones are all either already working in the industry or studying at the super-competitive National School of Drama.