LOL...I know, right? I graduated from college with a degree in business in '83, and my companies kept closing and going overseas or downsizing, so I went back in '95-96 and got a degree in Secondary Ed-English.
I was stunned how far standards had fallen in just 12 years. I was a 3.2 GPA student the firt time around, and struggled for that. I was 4.0 without working much at all in the mid 90s. I was taking 300-400 level courses in teacher prep for people who were going to go out and teach English, and most of them had never had a single course in grammar...and worse didn't care that they knew nothing about grammar. Some couldn't write a decent sentence, just like you experienced, in the ENGLISH major!