The Real Cause of Grade Inflation
Since pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses began waning, culture warriors have been casting about for a new controversy in elite higher education. Last October, Harvard handed them one.
Amanda Claybaugh, the school’s dean of undergraduate education, took the unusual step of making public an internal report titled “Re-Centering Academics at Harvard College.” In doing so, she thrust a long-standing conservative grievance back into the headlines: grade inflation.
Of all the culture war battles surrounding U.S. higher education, grade inflation—that is, the steady upward creep of undergraduate GPAs—has had the longest shelf life. The term, attributed to the Harvard sociologist David Riesman, first appeared in a 1972 front-page New York Times article. Riesman chalked up rising GPAs to “anti-elitist” faculty who, in his words, rejected “the university’s attempt to codify human beings.” In today’s vocabulary, we might call that wokeness.
Grade inflation quickly emerged as a synecdoche for broader cultural unease with the state of American higher education, and, by extension, “kids these days.” Maybe grade inflation was a scheme to pacify New Left student-radicals, or perhaps a crutch for underprepared minority students. Either way, the ivory tower had been overrun by a generation of students who looked, acted, and thought nothing like those who came before.
Grade inflation quickly emerged as a synecdoche for broader cultural unease with the state of American higher education, and, by extension, “kids these days.” Maybe grade inflation was a scheme to pacify New Left student-radicals, or perhaps a crutch for underprepared minority students.
Nearly 50 years after the phrase’s coinage, we are again living in the wake of historic unrest on college campuses. And, in the right-wing media, the old narratives about grade inflation have returned with new force.
One Daily Caller author sneered that a Harvard student upset about potential grade deflation displayed “the entitlement of a person who Didn’t Earn It (DEI).” One particularly imaginative Wall Street Journal columnist, meanwhile, posited that grade inflation was the animating spirit of Zohran Mamdani’s successful New York mayoral campaign. Coddled graduates had been left unequipped for the job market by their easy-A college educations, she mused, and thus turned to politics—electing a 34-year-old democratic socialist who, fittingly, hailed from an elite liberal arts college himself.
These are the makings of a classic moral panic. But unlike most moral panics surrounding American higher education, this one is based in reality. College GPAs nationally have, indeed, surged—even as many indicators of academic performance have declined. This pattern has only become more acute in the wake of the pandemic.
If you care about education (or the well-being of young people), you should care about grade inflation. When grades lose their meaning, students lose crucial feedback about their strengths and weaknesses. They graduate without understanding where they truly excel and where they need improvement. And employers and graduate schools struggle to distinguish between candidates, forcing them to rely on ever-more-arbitrary signals of merit—for instance, the prestige of the college one attended. Never mind that admission to elite colleges is usually shaped by prior advantages, like whether your parents shelled out for a fancy private high school and a college consultant. The end result is a system that fails everyone: students, educators, and the institutions that depend on transcripts to make high-stakes decisions.
Unlike most moral panics surrounding American higher education, runaway grade inflation is based in reality. College GPAs nationally have, indeed, surged—even as many indicators of academic performance have declined.
To some on the left, the issue codes as politically unsavory. To them, discussing it carries the stench of right-wing cultural warfare. That’s a shame, because closely examining the phenomenon’s history, what you find, instead, is a familiar pattern across so many dysfunctional American institutions—one that vindicates the left’s suspicions about what ails the American university. Faculty are a broken labor force, and academic life has been reorganized by free-market managerial principles. What unites both Harvard’s critics and Harvard itself is their shared blindness to that fact.
National data on grade inflation is mostly the work of two men: Christopher Healy, a former computer scientist at Furman University, and Stuart Rojstaczer, a onetime geophysicist at Duke. (He left his faculty position in 2005 to become a novelist and singer-songwriter.) In their 2012 research paper “Where A Is Ordinary,” the pair reported having collected average grade data from more than 200 universities, with records dating back to 1936.
Their most important finding is that grade inflation is more or less a national pattern. It’s more intense at private universities, especially selective ones, but it afflicts campuses of all shapes, sizes, and acceptance rates. So if you want to understand what’s driving grade inflation, even at a place like Harvard, you should begin by asking what it shares with far less selective schools.
But many pundits do the opposite, blaming the issue on selective colleges’ admissions policies. They treat Harvard as a special case, an outlier corrupted by its own excellence. It’s convenient framing: It allows critics to attack elite institutions without grappling with the structural rot that extends across the entire system.
If grade inflation is so tightly linked to hyper-selective admissions, as conservative critics charge, why have other vastly less-selective institutions experienced the same phenomenon?
In an article headlined “The Perverse Consequences of the Easy A,” The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch argues that the phenomenon’s roots at Harvard lie in the rise of hyper-selective admissions over the past two decades, which created a campus full of students who “had only ever gotten perfect grades.” When these students started “sobbing at office hours” over B+ marks, faculty came under increased “pressure to tend to their students’ emotional well-being.”
It’s a plausible story. But if grade inflation is so tightly linked to hyper-selective admissions, why, then, have other vastly less-selective institutions experienced the same phenomenon? Community colleges, where “sobbing at office hours” over a B+ would be alien behavior, have seen their GPAs climb as well. The elite-admissions theory can’t explain grade inflation at schools where students weren’t straight-A high schoolers to begin with.
Horowitch isn’t the only observer to fixate on elite institutions as though they operate in a vacuum, exempt from broader economic forces.
At Harvard, the first professor to raise the alarm about grade inflation was the conservative political theorist Harvey C. Mansfield, nicknamed “C-minus Mansfield” for his longtime refusal to inflate grades. Mansfield, too, chalked the phenomenon up to admissions policies at elite colleges: In 1993, he controversially argued that the introduction of affirmative action had led to the admission of many academically weaker, Black students.
Concerned that assigning those students lower grades on average might be perceived as racially biased, Mansfield’s line of reasoning goes, faculty members began inflating grades across the board. As Mansfield wrote in The Harvard Crimson, they had become “unable” to distinguish between “affirmative action for Blacks in admissions” and “affirmative action in grading.”
It’s a conceptually elegant theory, repeated even by some left-leaning scholars. But it rests on an empirically inaccurate claim: that grade inflation has persisted steadily since the advent of race-conscious admissions. It repeats the assumption that selective universities alone are driving the trend. But grade inflation at Harvard closely tracks a national pattern. If grade inflation began occurring at selective universities at the same time it began occurring everywhere, it’s safe to say there’s something at play here that goes beyond Harvard’s admissions policy.
Rojstaczer and Healy find that the inflationary spike Mansfield attributed to affirmative action fizzled out by 1975. Why? Rojstaczer terms that wave, which spanned roughly from 1964 to 1975, the “Vietnam era of grade inflation.” Full-time male college students were exempt from the draft. If one flunked out, he’d likely be sent to fight, and possibly die, in Vietnam. If a professor could save a student from that fate, they would.
Rojstaczer and Healy determined that after the Vietnam War ended—and with it, the pressure to keep male students enrolled—grade inflation began to plateau. The share of students receiving A-range grades actually dipped slightly from 1975 to 1982. And even observers who initially attributed the trend to “anti-elitism”—like the Michigan State University professor Arvo E. Juola, who conducted one of the earliest comprehensive studies of the issue in 1974—ultimately acknowledged the “cessation of the 15-year trend toward higher grades” later in the decade.
It wasn’t until 1983, nearly two decades after the beginning of affirmative action, that GPAs began rising again. But if efforts to diversify campuses didn’t cause that wave, what did?
Rojstaczer, for his part, attributes this second inflationary wave to the “student as consumer era.” In the 1980s, as federal support for higher education shifted from federal grants toward student loans taken out on an individual basis, universities began treating students as paying customers. And the customer, of course, is always right.
What did that mean in practice? At many universities, student course evaluations—which, in turn, determine an instructor’s likelihood of promotion, tenure, or future hiring—became mandatory. (At Harvard, if you’re teaching more than five students, you’re getting evaluated.) Crushed by debt, students are no longer treated, or treating themselves, as acolytes in pursuit of knowledge, but as customers trying to maximize the value of an expensive purchase. Many colleges now explicitly hawk post-graduation earnings as a key selling point to prospective students.
At once, as the supply of college-age students contracted in the early 1980s, universities opted to compete on “quality” of the student experience. They poured money into sports facilities, renovated dorms, and a broad range of student services, and have continued to treat those as competitive benchmarks ever since.
Teaching students reliably turns a profit at most top universities. In a study of 185 private, nonprofit doctoral institutions in the United States (of 737 in total), the scholars Sue Doe and Steven Shulman found that just 22 spent more on educating students than they received in tuition. But amenities offer little direct financial return. So universities turned to other corners of campus life—graduate programs, research centers, health systems, and, yes, undergraduate education—to chase revenue instead.
Adjuncts’ contracts last a year, maybe less, and are rarely renewed more than a few times. (Universities prefer a rotating labor force.) So they teach under the ever-present threat of nonrenewal, judged largely by 19-year-olds. Graduate instructors, facing a brutal academic job market, are just as dependent on student ratings to survive.
One way to wring profit from the academic side of the university is to pay professors less. The most direct way to do that is to reduce tenure track hiring. Then, they compensate in two ways. First, they hire contingent faculty on temporary, contract-based positions with no path to tenure. And second, they allocate work that would have once gone to faculty to graduate students.
Adjuncts compose an ever-growing share of the academic labor force. In 1975, contingent faculty made up 55 percent of the instructional workforce. By 1995, they were two-thirds. By 2015, they composed nearly seven in 10. In addition, graduate student workers do an ever-growing share of the work of teaching and grading. These strategies make education cheaper to deliver, but, in doing so, cheapen it in every other sense.
Both groups live and die by the student evaluation. As Caroline Frederickson noted in Washington Monthly in 2015, they are “the most significant factor in whether they will be hired for another semester.” Adjuncts’ contracts last a year, maybe less, and are rarely renewed more than a few times. (Universities prefer a rotating labor force.) So they teach under the ever-present threat of nonrenewal, judged largely by 19-year-olds. Graduate instructors, facing a brutal academic job market, are equally dependent upon student ratings for their survival.
These pressures, one graduate student instructor at a large private research university told me, are especially intense at the top of the grading scale. “It just feels like they aren’t the students you want to pick a fight with,” he said of those submitting work that would, in a vacuum, deserve a B-range grade. But those students are also more likely to complete course evaluations, so they’re given As. That pressure helps explain the vanishing B-range grade in Rojstaczer and Healy’s data. “It’s much easier to just give them the grade they want and sleep easy knowing what kind of evals are going into my portfolio,” the instructor said.
And for this work, they’re usually poorly paid. During the 2023–24 academic year, the average part-time faculty member earned $4,093 per three-credit course section. Between four hours in the classroom, and additional time in office hours, alongside prep work (two-ish hours for every hour in the classroom) and grading, they’re often making below minimum wage.
Giving a bad grade isn’t easy. It requires leaving meticulous comments and correcting every mistake, and, as is often the case, meeting with an upset student after the fact. And every minute spent grading is a minute not spent on research, which determines one’s chances in the job market.
Giving a bad grade isn’t easy. It requires leaving meticulous comments and correcting every mistake, and, as is often the case, meeting with an upset student after the fact. And every minute spent grading is a minute not spent on research, which determines one’s chances in the job market.
A math doctoral student at an elite private university told me she was paid for about seven hours of grading per week. But with more than 30 students, and each assignment requiring at least half an hour to grade, she’d have to double her paid hours to keep up. “It doesn’t pencil out,” she said.
It’s hardly shocking that, between the option to expend extra, unpaid effort on grading—followed, perhaps, by getting slammed in one’s evals, or getting bogged down in perpetual and time-consuming appeals—or give an unearned grade and be done with it, most choose the latter.
If you’re really unlucky, students complain to higher-ups, and escalate into Kafkaesque appeals processes. “Administratively, I don’t think I could give an F on an assignment a student turned in,” a teaching assistant at a flagship public university told me. Even clear-cut cases of cheating, he said, are effectively unpunishable.
In one case, he caught about 10 students cheating on an exam, but “the faculty member advising the course said I had to let it go.” That’s because “administrative rules at the university are so burdensome that unless you rip the test off the student’s desk while they are in flagrante delicto cheating, you shouldn’t even bother,” he said.
One graduate student worker at a large private university told me he estimates that a third of his students’ assignments are generated by AI. But given his pay, and the number of hours in the day, he said, “it would be impossible to spend the time dealing with them all.” As for his ability to grade thoroughly, “it’s hard to find the motivation for what I’m paid.”
While unionization improves working conditions for many graduate instructors, it has not resolved the core structural issue: a growing mismatch between the grading demands of undergraduate courses and the labor allocated to meet them. As a UAW-affiliated economics doctoral candidate at UMass Amherst told me, “If you have to grade assignments regularly for around 80 students on top of holding office hours, teaching a discussion section, attending your actual PhD classes, and theoretically preparing for your own research on top of that, then offering detailed feedback will of course be all but impossible for most.”
As universities cut down on or completely halt PhD admissions, that imbalance is set to deepen. They need more labor than ever, even as they hire fewer people to provide it. Put simply, that’s not a recipe for high-quality output.
Another way to wring profit from teaching is to fund and defund departments according to which ones attract the most students. Why squander tenure track jobs and doctoral student openings on history when you could plow them into economics and computer science instead?
The most obvious measure of a department’s popularity is, of course, whether their courses attract and retain students. “Class enrollment numbers play a huge role in a variety of bureaucratic decisions in the contemporary university, everything from graduate admissions to new tenure hires,” Erik Baker, a Harvard historian, told me. “Acquiring a reputation for strictness,” he said, “can doom enrollment.” And with funding tied to success in a zero-sum competition for undergraduates, every department (except those that reliably feed high-paying careers) is locked in a race to the bottom on rigor.
It might be true that individual instructor preferences toward leniency contribute marginally to grade inflation. But structurally, the incentive environment is one-sided. Everything encourages inflation; nothing rewards restraint.
A math PhD student at an elite private university told me she was paid for about seven hours of grading per week. But with over thirty students, and each assignment requiring at least half an hour to grade, she’d have to double her paid hours to keep up. “It doesn’t pencil out,” she said.
After years of denying the issue, administrators at Harvard and elsewhere are coming around to the reality that grade inflation is real, and that it poses a serious threat to the quality of undergraduate education. But neither they nor the pundit class have come any closer to confronting the political economy that drives it.
Beyond a cursory discussion of student evaluations, Harvard’s own report does not reckon, in any meaningful sense, with the working conditions that deprive instructors of the time necessary to grade thoroughly and accurately. Instead, it proposes a series of half measures. Some, like “recording the median grade for every course on one’s transcript,” would help make transcripts more intelligible to job recruiters, and, the report speculates, “reduce the pressure students currently feel to take easily graded courses, since the benefits of doing so would be less.”
Such a reform might resolve the demand-side pressure to inflate grades, but not—as should by now be apparent—the supply-side dynamics that have sustained the phenomenon for more than four decades. Another of the report’s proposed fixes is to inflate grades even further. Harvard doesn’t currently award A+ grades; perhaps, it suggests, doing so would help differentiate the truly outstanding from the simply good.
These proposed solutions are insufficient. But the solutions proposed by Harvard’s critics are even more useless and, in all likelihood, would worsen the quality of its education.
In the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal blog, Neetu Arnold, a Manhattan Institute education policy analyst, proposes that Harvard simply force departments to institute a “standardized, university-wide grading curve.” This, she writes, would “allow faculty to apply strict grading standards guilt-free but also help modify student expectations.”
Arnold, like many observers of higher education, conceives of the grade inflation issue as one of mushy faculty and whiny students. Imposing the cold hard reality of a normal statistical distribution will whip both into shape, making transcripts more closely reflect a student’s achievement relative to their peers.
In practice, here’s what that looks like: Your instructor is an adjunct who, after hours of prep and grading, earns less than minimum wage. She has to churn through 30-odd papers in one sitting, so your feedback amounts to a few scribbles (“very good,” “explain more”) before she hands it back with a 94. But because grades must conform to a bell curve, your 94 becomes a B-. (Everyone else got a 95.)
Can we confidently say that your 94, or your classmates’ 95, reflects some real difference in academic ability? No: Your instructor is too underpaid and overworked to grade with that kind of precision. We’d come no closer to a system where grades reflect real differences in ability.
Harvard’s report closes by noting the long history of efforts to curb grade inflation—many of them, like Arnold’s proposal, centered on mandatory curves and grade quotas. Princeton imposed a 35 percent cap on A grades in 2004, only to abandon the policy a decade later after finding it failed to create “fair and consistent” grading standards, hurt student recruitment (particularly of athletes), and left students feeling disadvantaged in graduate school admissions. Wellesley adopted a similar policy limiting average grades in introductory courses to B+, but repealed it in 2016 after students protested the school’s “unilateral disarmament” in a competitive labor market. Both institutions saw grades resume their upward trajectory almost immediately after abandoning these deflationary policies. “This history might seem to suggest that grading is an insoluble problem,” the report concludes. Absent from the history of ill-conceived attempts to deflate grades, though, are any institutions that have dealt with the labor issue at its heart.
In repeating that colleges have “gone soft,” pundits are, in some sense, telling universities what they want to hear. Schools would much rather wring their hands over vague cultural “softness” than admit the obvious: that their revenue-maximizing logic is actively undermining educational quality.
In one article on the subject, the writer Yascha Mounk describes the problem by tweaking an old Soviet joke: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” At universities today, he writes, “students pretend to do their work, and academics pretend to grade them.” But the joke doesn’t need rewriting. Graduate students go through the motions of completing their overwhelming workloads; universities, in turn, go through the motions of paying them. The question, at its heart, is just how long the charade can last.
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