No Class

Bill Clinton's education-as-entitlement programs threaten to reverse positive trends in higher education.

Virginia Postrel from the May 1997 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Even the purely economic parts of Clinton's plans could push grades up. There appears to be a connection between rising tuitions and rising grades.

Although less selective institutions still try to weed students out, grade inflation has become a major problem at elite universities. The Vietnam-era inflation is well known; professors who feared casting students out into the draft boosted grades in the late 1960s and early '70s. What is less heralded is the enormous jump elite-college grades have taken since the mid-'80s, the very period during which both the cost and the value of a college degree have escalated rapidly. During my years at Princeton, from 1978 to 1982, about 30 percent of grades were A's of various sorts, a level the school had maintained since a huge jump in the early '70s. Today, however, that figure stands at 45 percent. The pattern is repeated at similar schools.

"The language of grading is utterly debased,"comparative literature professor Clarence Brown told the Princeton Alumni Weekly."The chairman of the math department noted that when a professor gave C's to a third of the students in his linear algebra class--a common distribution only a decade before--he got a "long letter"from a dean complaining that such grading would discourage students.

No one knows exactly what happened to push grades up. Princeton Registrar Anthony Broh attributes the jump to pressure from students competing for graduate and professional school slots. But entering college students are also more likely to be accustomed to pumped-up grades; since the mid-'80s, the high school grades of college freshmen have skyrocketed, even though more students are going to college. It's not surprising, then, that they expect--and sometimes demand--to do equally well in college. As tuitions go up, students demand "more"for their money. Since most students are not budding intellectuals but pragmatic pre-professionals, "more"means a handsome transcript, rather than the knowledge it might represent. If you are paying $25,000 a year, you do not expect to be handed bad grades.

But there are signs that universities are worried about meaningless grades. Stanford, famous even in my college years as the school with no B's, has restored the F. Dartmouth has begun reporting not just grades but the course median and number of students. Princeton is considering a similar approach. Brown, the comp. lit. professor, rejoices that 35 Princeton students--including one who flunked his class--weren't able to graduate last year because of academic failure. "It is a great solace to know that an institution's backbone is on the mend,"he writes.

And, once again, Clinton's tax credits for B's and education-as-an-entitlement philosophy can only do damage. Increasing the demand for higher education and pushing up the price will only heighten students' sense that they deserve high grades just for getting into an expensive, elite school. In fact, Clinton promises to spread that baleful attitude down to the lowliest community college, until every student in America feels he or she deserves a diploma and an A-studded transcript just for showing up. That is hardly the way "to prepare our people for the bold new world of the 21st century."We can only hope that the professor-filled GOP leadership will develop the backbone to say so.

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