R Salanter used to say that when someone is not paying attention while learning in Lita, it leads to a professor in Paris going OTD. So, it makes sense to look at quality of learning.
First, a simple question of measuring that quality. It was always an issue. During BM2, first attempt at public education was for fathers to teach and that did not have consistent quality (2nd to go to Yerushalaim had logistics problems), 3rd – to teach teenagers in regional centers did not work because teenagers did not listen [quality of teachers, I presume, as it was not an issue in Yerushalaim], what worked – teaching small kids locally, maybe not high quality but giving them information before they are capable of rebelling.
Som with early yeshivos – I presume Netziv was able to know and lead his 400 students. But in our days, with so many yeshivos, the standards are uneven and are known word-of-mouth among locals. We here inCR are sometimes shocked that some of us are bakiim in certain things and have
no idea of others. We need some sort of TSAT, Torah SAT with scores in different areas. It is OK to have 800 on tosfos, but 0 on chassidus. This score will accurately describe the student and the school, and then we can start thinking on what can be improved. The fact that we do not have such measurements tells something about the state of learning.