The 2025 discourse about grade inflation deserves a C

The price of groceries and other necessities isn’t the only thing subject to inflation. As we close out the year, a spate of news stories has focused on reports that grades given to college students have soared in recent years, even as evidence mounts that a growing number of freshmen are showing up for college ill-prepared in basic subjects like math.

Critics have predictably framed the problem in classic culture war terms, accusing students of being "snowflakes" who can no longer tolerate anything less than an A. But that ignores the fact that the problem has been over half a century in the making, one born of longstanding forces beyond the ability of any single college or university to fix.

From the 1920s through the 1950s, the average GPA of college and university students at both public and private institutions hovered somewhere between 2.3 and 2.5 — basically, a C average. This was the golden age of the "gentleman’s C," a respectable grade at the time.

The mention of "gentleman" is instructive, underscoring the very different role that higher education formerly played in the nation. Before the postwar era, college education was less a means of social mobility than a ratification of one’s elite social status. Admission was all but guaranteed; grades didn’t really matter. Just look at Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s report card at Harvard University — mostly Cs. It’s safe to assume he didn’t fear for his future.

By the mid-20th century, a heretical idea gained currency in higher education: Merit or talent should matter more than social status. If someone was intelligent, they deserved to go to college. The notion went hand-in-hand with the rise of standardized testing, which was designed to find these naturally gifted students so that they could achieve their full potential.

While this democratization of higher education was a laudable development, it undercut the idea that grades didn’t matter. Someone who showed up at college in the 1950s from a more modest background couldn’t fall back on family connections. They needed to excel in the classroom, particularly because they tended to be on scholarships or, after World War II, the GI Bill — both of which expected students to maintain minimum GPAs. Grades mattered, and "grade grubbing," virtually unheard of before this time, made its debut early in the next decade.

By the mid-1960s, the Vietnam War made the quest for above-average grades a matter of life and death. Men attending college between 1964 and 1973 could avoid being drafted if they maintained respectable grades. Professors, fearful that a D or an F might send a student to Vietnam, allegedly became more lenient, though this explanation rests largely on anecdotal evidence.

Whatever role Vietnam may have played in inflating grades was ultimately overshadowed by another factor. Unlike an earlier generation of strivers, who might be attending on scholarships or the GI Bill, a new cohort of students going to college in the late 1960s and 1970s funded their education with their own hard-earned money or, increasingly, student loan programs backstopped by the federal government. This shift made degree seekers into what came to be known, somewhat pejoratively, as "students-as-consumers." They were buying something, and bad grades weren’t on their shopping list.

Over the course of the 1970s, colleges and universities had growing incentives to respond in kind, particularly when enrollments dipped as the oversized generation of baby boomers completed their education. The decline threatened colleges’ bottom lines, so schools developed elaborate marketing campaigns designed to recruit and retain students.

Harsh grading wasn’t compatible with this new emphasis on treating students like customers. Professors, a growing number of whom lacked the protections of tenure, found that holding the line against grade inflation would result in declining enrollments, if not loss of a job.

It was around this time that now-familiar laments about the practice of grade inflation began appearing in the popular press. Fifty years ago, columnist George Will gravely reported that "higher education today is suffering from an affliction more ruinous than yesterday’s plague of idealistic arsonists. The affliction is grade inflation." In a harbinger of today’s headlines about elite universities, Will reported that the average grade at Stanford University was an A-, while 41% of graduating seniors at Dartmouth University earned As.

We were a long way from the "gentleman’s C" then, and not a whole lot has changed in the intervening decades, despite endless, predictable handwringing. I’m a professor, and if I had to give these laments a grade, it would be a "C" on the grounds that they’re neither original nor constructive.

The public has to understand that this is a national problem that deserves a national solution. No single institution can fight back against grade inflation for the simple reason that doing so would inevitably disadvantage its graduates relative to more permissive colleges and universities. Education works like a marketplace: If Harvard, for example, unilaterally went back to the way it graded students a century ago, its graduates would look worse on paper than those from other Ivies when applying to law school or for that position at McKinsey & Co.

The federal government already serves as a clearinghouse for information on the affordability of colleges and universities, enabling students and their parents to weigh the relative cost of different schools. It could do the same for grade inflation, creating an index that shows how significant that "A" really is. Employers in particular would benefit from being able to determine how a student’s seemingly impressive GPA compares to their peers.

Absent a national intervention, we can safely assume that 50 years from now, we’ll be reading yet more tiresome editorials lamenting the fact that most college students get As. And if that happens, we’ll all deserve an "F."

This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Stephen Mihm, a professor of history at the University of Georgia, is coauthor of "Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance."