Absolutely; it's a real problem. But institutions like MIT have also been participating in, and benefiting from, this transactional relationship from their side in offering degrees that they know carry so much value.

MIT makes all its money from research (and investing its endowment more successfully than most schools), not tuition, and the success in research comes from having such a high-achieving community of faculty and graduate students. They're pretty incentivized to keep the bar for academic achievement genuinely high.