Most college students can admit that grade inflation is real. It’s evident in the numbers — from 1990 to 2020, median college GPAs increased by 21.5% — and it’s evident anecdotally. As a business administration student, I personally have come into contact with the rather absurd D’Amore-McKim School of Business policy to curve all students’ final grades to a B+ average, and as a political science student let’s just say that Bs are the new Ds.
Suffice to say, grade inflation is present at Northeastern — and it’s not the only university affected.
More interesting to consider is why the idea of “grade inflation” has become so prevalent in today’s national discourse, and why it seems to be on the rise. There are a few common explanations: that artificial intelligence, or AI, is allowing students to get better grades, that students now feel entitled to good grades because they were raised “soft” or that an increase in academic competition has driven grades higher.
But none of these theories account for how persistent an issue grade inflation has been over time. The alarm was first raised over 40 years ago, making the issue hardly attributable to AI. And, aside from the general skepticism we should all have against claims so broad as to be “generational,” this issue has existed long enough to make it hard to blame any one generation, or any increase in competition among peers.
So, none of these solutions can be the root cause of grade inflation. The real culprit is far more structural — and far less comfortable to confront.
Grade inflation is the result of a fundamental disconnect at the heart of higher education; college is no longer about producing good students but about producing lucrative degrees. As college has grown increasingly expensive and increasingly vital to one’s future success, students expect a return on their investment. And they’re not wrong to! With college so essential, and its prices so exorbitant, a student getting a C simply no longer makes sense for any party involved.
Northeastern represents the perfect distillation of this phenomenon. At a university that can cost $200,000 for a four-year degree and touts a co-op program where students become more competitive in their respective fields through industry experience as a main selling point, it’s hard not to see an education as a means to an end. Northeastern’s value proposition as a university is built on this bargain, and the quality of that bargain suffers if the prospect of going to Northeastern includes getting a GPA that would lower one’s value to future employers.
That’s why Northeastern won’t do anything to fix grade inflation. If it made classes harder or curved students’ grades around a lower average, then its students would be less competitive to undifferentiating employers who don’t have time to sort through whether a 3.6 GPA from a competing school is worth less than a 3.2 GPA at a suddenly-difficult Northeastern.
No university wants to be the one that blinks first.
So, why does this matter? Why can’t students keep getting higher and higher grades? It might seem like the only ones negatively affected by grade inflation are employers, who have a harder time finding top-performers among potential candidates. However, there are problems looming on the horizon. The power of the college degree is diluted every time a mediocre student receives a high GPA, and over time, the effect will compound.
That’s why grade inflation matters: It’s the first side effect of the shift away from students and toward degrees. It’s a canary in the coal mine for higher education, and one we should all be paying careful attention to. If the situation continues to worsen, the effects will only grow in scale and significance. Northeastern recently cut its College of Social Sciences and Humanities discretionary funding by 75 to 80%. This is while business school enrollment and funding continue to skyrocket.
The message here is clear: education is only valuable if it is profitable, both for students and for the school. And if that’s the case — if the purpose of college is to produce valuable diplomas instead of informed students — then grade inflation isn’t a bug in the system. It’s a feature.
Arvind Chettiar is a third-year business administration and political science combined major. He can be reached at [email protected].
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