For every one student who is very driven and motivated to self-study, there are 99 who are not and need the coercion of a teacher and threat of a bad grade to study.
See my other comment - is it a good idea to force them to get a degree? Doesn't it make the degree worthless? Instead of signalling "this person was able to learn something important" it says "this person has been forced to spend X years in a place where he was bored to death".
(I think there was an Army joke saying something like "private X is able to work when cornered and closely supervised", or something like that.)
