Back in the 1980s and 1990s, and likely before that, the University of Southern California (USC) had the reputation of a “safety school.” The biggest challenge to what some referred to as the University of Spoiled Children was the nosebleed tuition, not attaining the proverbial fat envelope.
Fast forward to the present, and USC is now very difficult to gain admittance to. More than a few of its grads from the late 20th century would willingly admit they couldn’t get in today. What’s notable about the growing difficulty of getting into USC is that it’s no different from a lot of schools.
It’s something to think about with Harvard top of mind. In a September essay published in the Wall Street Journal, Johns Hopkins professor Yascha Mounk reported that in 1950, the average GPA at Harvard was 2.6. By 2003 it was 3.4, and in the present it’s 3.8.
Mounk wrote that Yale is no different, that “80% of grades awarded in 2023 were As or A minuses.” Mounk’s expressed view is that the “more elite the college, the more lenient the standards” on the way to “grade inflation” that is “out of control.” But is it? What’s happening at USC and lots of schools like USC suggest Mounk is overstating his case.
With it increasingly challenging to gain admittance to schools like USC, stop and think how difficult it must be to get into Harvard, Yale, Stanford or Princeton. With each passing year, more and more Americans have both the means and the qualifications to apply to the schools mentioned. And that’s just accounting for American students.
What about outside the U.S.? In his excellent 2014 book Age of Ambition, Evan Osnos (former Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker) observed that in 2005 there were 65 Chinese students in private U.S. high schools. By 2010, the previous number had risen beyond 7,000. Cornell professor Eswar Prasad reports that as of 2017, the number of Chinese students attending U.S. universities had soared past 300,000. It’s a long way of saying that as the global economy liberalizes, the number of talented individuals vying for a limited number of spaces at the U.S.’s world-leading universities grows by leaps and bounds.
Which is a reminder that “tuition inflation” is even more difficult to take seriously than “grade inflation.” Conservatives who should know better claim that the former is caused by easy federal financing of student loans. Without defending federal student loans for even a second (the view here is that they hurt the students most in need), it’s apparent from soaring tuition costs in both private K-12 and college that the real story is the number of students and parents of means willing to pay most anything to get their kids into the “right” school.
Back to worries about “grade inflation,” a not unreasonable case can be made that the quality of students applying to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton in 1950 didn’t measure up to the individuals applying today. Since there are exponentially more highly qualified individuals fighting for a finite number of spots, isn’t it pretty logical that the average grade point at the Harvards and Yales would be much higher?
Which presumably helps explain Mounk’s empirical observation that the alleged problem of “grade inflation” is “also prevalent at less selective colleges.” A not unreasonable speculation is that the students vying for admission to USC in 2024 don’t resemble the qualification makeup of those who matriculated in the 1980s, and they don’t because their achievements, grades and SAT scores much more resemble those of the students who turned their noses up to USC in 1980 in favor of Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and Yale.
In short, “grade inflation” is just another term for progress.
