Remember when getting an A at an Ivy League school actually meant something special?
Yeah, me too. Or at least I thought I did.
A few days ago one of America’s most prestigious universities quietly released a report that basically admits the emperor has no clothes: almost six out of ten undergraduate grades handed out today are A-range. That’s not a typo. We’re talking A or A-minus for the majority of students, a figure that has skyrocketed from about one in four just twenty years ago.
And the faculty aren’t happy about it. In fact, they used the word damaging—multiple times—to describe what this trend is doing to the entire learning environment.
The Moment Harvard Admitted the Obvious
Let’s be honest: most of us who have watched elite higher education over the past decade have seen this coming from a mile away. Tuition keeps climbing, campuses keep getting fancier, but the actual academic challenge? That seems to have taken a permanent vacation.
Yet there’s something jarring about seeing it in black and white from the university itself. The Office of Undergraduate Education sent every professor and student a 25 pages spelling out how broken the grading system has become. The language is surprisingly blunt for an institution that usually speaks in carefully measured paragraphs.
One dean wrote that grades “no longer perform their primary functions” and are “undermining our academic mission.” Translation: the little letters on your transcript have become almost meaningless.
How Did We Get Here?
There isn’t one single villain in this story, but there are plenty of accomplices.
- Pressure on professors to keep students (and their parents) happy—because unhappy students leave bad evaluations, and bad evaluations can hurt tenure chances.
- The rise of “student as customer” culture where universities compete for applicants by offering the path of least resistance.
- The extracurricular arms race that pushes ambitious kids to treat classes as a checkbox rather than the main event.
- And yes, the quiet fear that if you grade too harshly, your section will empty out while the “easy A” professor down the hall fills every seat.
Put those incentives together and you get a slow but relentless drift upward. A B+ becomes the new C. An A- becomes the new gentleman’s C. And suddenly everyone is “excellent.”
The Numbers Don’t Lie (Even If the Grades Do)
Let’s throw some concrete figures at you, because they’re honestly staggering.
Twenty years ago roughly 25% of all grades fell in the A range. Today that number sits around 60%. In some departments it’s pushing 80%. We’re not talking about a gentle curve upward; we’re talking about a rocket ship.
One retired professor put it brutally: “The principle of merit that gets you into the university is basically abandoned the moment you arrive.” Ouch. But hard to argue when the point.
“Nearly all faculty expressed serious concern… our grading no longer performs its primary functions and is undermining our academic mission.”
– Dean of Undergraduate Education
When even the people handing out the grades are waving the white flag, you know the system is in trouble.
Why This Actually Matters (Beyond Hurt Feelings)
You might be thinking, “Who cares? Everyone gets good grades, everyone gets good jobs, the world keeps turning.”
Fair point on the surface. But dig a little deeper and the consequences start piling up.
- Employers can no longer trust transcripts. A 3.9 from 2025 tells them almost nothing about actual ability.
- Graduate programs and professional schools are drowning in perfect-GPA applicants and have to fall back on ever-more-expensive signaling games (research, internships, networking).
- Students themselves lose the feedback loop that tells them where they actually stand. If everyone is “above average,” no one knows what real excellence looks like.
- And perhaps most worrying: actual learning takes a backseat when the incentive is simply not to fail rather than to master difficult material.
In my view, the scariest part is how this hollows out the very idea of an elite education. If the time you graduate, the diploma says less about intellectual achievement and more about endurance and social navigation.
The AI Elephant in the Room
Oh, and then there’s artificial intelligence.
The report specifically calls for bringing back in-person, closed-book, sit-down exams because “they remain vital in the age of AI.” That sentence alone tells you how fast things are moving. When one of the world’s leading universities feels compelled to mandate old-school testing just to keep grades honest, we’ve officially entered a new era.
Because let’s be real: if 60% of students are already getting A’s without AI, what happens when every paper can be polished to perfection in thirty seconds? The entire grading edifice could collapse overnight.
Are They Actually Going to Fix It?
Here’s where things get interesting.
The report floats several concrete ideas:
- Publishing each course’s median grade on transcripts so everyone can see who the easy graders are.
- Allowing a limited number of rare A+ grades to re-introduce a ceiling for true excellence.
- Standardizing grading across different sections of the same class (goodbye, shopping for the lenient teaching fellow).
- Clearer clear grading rubrics so students know exactly what earns an A versus a B.
Some of these are genuinely bold. Publishing median grades, in particular, would shine a very bright light on departments and professors who have been coasting.
But will leadership actually pull the trigger? Past attempts to curb grade inflation at elite schools have usually ended in quiet retreat once students and alumni start complaining. We’ve seen this movie before.
The Bigger Picture for American Higher Education
Here’s the part that should worry every parent paying $80,000 a year: when the most prestigious university in the country has to issue, the rest of the ecosystem tends to follow.
One education watchdog phrased it perfectly: “As goes the top school, so goes the nation.” If the gold standard is quietly lowering its standards, why should anyone else hold the line? Especially when colleges are fighting over a shrinking pool of applicants?
We’re already seeing the ripple effects. State universities proudly advertise their own inflated GPA averages. Smaller liberal-arts colleges hand out honorary A’s just to keep enrollment numbers up. The entire hierarchy of “rigor” that used to separate tiers of schools is collapsing.
A Glimmer of Hope?
Believe it or not, there is one optimistic note.
Students themselves—yes, actual undergraduates—are speaking up. Some have launched initiatives calling for renewed “intellectual vitality.” Others wrote op-eds welcoming tougher standards. A few even suggested scrapping some of the lightweight general-education requirements that contribute to the problem.
Maybe Gen Z’s famous demand for authenticity will finally extend to the classroom. If students start rewarding professors who challenge them instead of professors who flatter them, real change becomes possible.
Stranger things have happened.
What Happens Next
We’re at a crossroads.
On one path, elite universities double down on rigor, bring back meaningful standards, and restore the value of their degrees. It would be painful in the short term—some entitled kids would cry, some parents would rage—but the payoff would be a renaissance of real intellectual achievement.
On the other path, they kick the can down the road, let AI finish the job, and quietly accept that the bachelor’s degree has become little more than an expensive participation trophy.
My money’s on the second path, sadly. But reports like this one give me a sliver of hope that maybe—just maybe—the adults in the room will remember why these institutions were built in the first place.
Because if even the most elite university in America can’t summon the courage to tell its students the truth about their work, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Time will tell. But for the first time in years, the conversation has finally started.
What do you think—can elite universities claw back real standards, or is the age of easy A’s here to stay? Drop your thoughts below. I read every comment.
