Yeah this is not surprising because at the end of the day, the degree is a class signal. The upper class want a system where their kids don't have to put in much work to benefit and that requires increasingly impossible barriers of entry for the lower classes. You having the balls to call the bluff worked out in your favor, and you're definitely not the first to figure it out.

Some of these commenters are so naive. Loads of kids pay their way into Harvard and Yale, then party through them, easily get the degree (because learning and discipline is not the point, the point is the exclusivity and the network), and then get a job through their family or family's connections where they don't actually have to know anything to do it.