Student Learning in the Higher Education Compact

Introduction

The authors of the Trump administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education were right to label the section on grade inflation “Student Learning.” The section demands that grades “not be inflated, or deflated, for any non-academic reason, but only rigorously reflect the demonstrated mastery of a subject.” We should emphasize the latter phrase. It’s the mastery that really counts, the actual knowledge and skills students acquire during the term.

When nearly half of college grades fall in the A range, we know that many course materials are too easy, workloads too light, and standards too low. It’s a simple formula: When rigor goes down, grades go up.

Evidence of curricular decay and rising grades is everywhere. The Problem: Student Learning

Evidence of curricular decay and rising grades is everywhere. Grade inflation now has a 60-year history. One widely cited study from 2012, which used data from more than 200 four-year universities, found that by 2009, A’s made up 43 percent of all letter grades, “an increase of 28 percentage points since 1960 and 12 percentage points since 1988.” In October 2025, using data from 2012 to 2024, two researchers writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education noted that average freshman grades across eight large public universities exhibited “steady increases through the 2010s, culminating in a sharp spike in 2020.”

At the vast majority of colleges, one can meet general education demands without reading any classics at all. These increases coincided with decreasing scores on standardized tests such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, SAT, and ACT, demonstrating that the increase did not happen because students got smarter. In October 2025, The Harvard Crimson reported on an internal study of Harvard’s grades—60 percent of which were A’s—that concluded the trend is “damaging the academic culture of the College.”

The same trend holds for course rigor. General education requirements once commonly included a semester of Western civilization. The syllabus assigned Homer, Plato, Dante, Galileo, Machiavelli, and other historical and challenging readings. I was an English lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in 1988–89. My course on American fiction met a general education requirement and included long novels from the 19th century such as Frank Norris’s McTeague and Henry James’s The American. Hundreds of students signed up because they didn’t have easier options.

Things have changed. At the vast majority of colleges, one can meet general education demands without reading any classics at all. At UCLA, the Foundations of Arts and Humanities requirement has dozens of choices each quarter, including Cultural History of Rap, Global Pop, Contemporary Chicano Theater: Beginning of Chicano Theater Movement, and America in Sixties: Politics, Society, and Culture, 1954 to 1974. None of those classes instill general knowledge in the young, only topical knowledge, and the materials are smoothly accessible, contemporary, and less demanding than canonical works. The teacher may have high ambitions, but the contents are less rigorous than what students faced before, so the grades rise.

This is not a negligible part of the grade inflation problem. According to one study, enrollment shifts into “‘easier-grading’ departments over time” account for one-quarter of the inflation. The dumbing down happens especially when departments feel pressure to get more bodies in seats to boost enrollment and justify their levels of financial support.

In 1970–71, when English claimed 7.6 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded, the discipline’s instructors could afford to assign dense and lengthy works such as Paradise Lost without worrying about losing sophomores to less-challenging majors. Now, English draws only 1.6 percent of college grads. It’s a marginal field, as are other former centers of liberal education including foreign languages, all of which account for only 0.7 percent of bachelor’s degrees in America; philosophy and religion (0.5 percent); and history, whose majors fell by more than one-third from 2012 to 2022. Given such paltry enrollment numbers, for an English department to require that all students struggle through the classics is a damaging policy.

Because humanities fields pull in little outside money, undergraduate enrollments are their only bottom-line rationale. A department with 10 professors and only 20 majors looks to the administration like a poorly performing investment.

Individual departments can’t raise their rigor and workload unless all other departments do it. Hence, in the competitive environment of today’s university, individual departments can’t raise their rigor and workload unless all other departments do it, and that’s not going to happen. Classes such as organic chemistry can afford to be exacting because they have a captive audience: If you want to go to medical school, you have to take them. A Spanish, English, or communications department that decided to cap the number of A’s it gave out would soon find more empty seats than before, not to mention lots of angry course evaluations and phone calls from parents. Needless to say, individual professors can’t curb grade inflation either—unless they want to make students, parents, and administrators angry. This is why pressure must come from the outside.

White House fiat alone will not fix the problem; too many courses, teachers, and complications are at play. A Better Solution

The compact demands that schools commit to “grade integrity.” Using “public accountability mechanisms,” schools must release to the public the grades they give, along with “grade distribution dashboards with multiyear trendlines, public statements that explain student outcomes and any unusual upward trends, and comparisons with peer institutions.” In other words, the administration asks schools to open their books.

I admire the administration’s commitment to combating this issue, but like many others, I have some concerns with its implementation. White House fiat alone will not fix the problem; too many courses, teachers, and complications are at play. To name just a few: Should an introductory French class of 12 students have the same grade distribution as an engineering class of 100? Should grade inflation be monitored for each individual class, the whole department (which would allow for some class variation), or only the entire institution? Will hard science departments such as physics, whose labs depend on federal funding, lash out at lenient units such as the “studies” programs for jeopardizing their work?

These are, indeed, genuine concerns. Implementation could be a mess. If schools and all their personnel did cooperate, perhaps it wouldn’t be so difficult for the leadership to set a cap on high grades. But cooperation won’t happen—hence the need for outside pressure.

The bare fact of raising the issue and asking schools merely to inform the public of its grades is a marvelous development, a long-overdue mode of accountability. What the compact proposes is a shame tactic, and it might work. People outside academia underestimate the power of shame within its walls. The current rates of A, A−, and B+ grades will prove an embarrassment, especially if schools post department-level results. Schools will adjust—not far, perhaps, but in the right direction.

Another partial solution could rest not in the government but in the college rankings industry, especially US News & World Report. These organizations could add a new anti–grade inflation element to their calculations. The category would set a threshold for A grades, perhaps 25 percent of the whole. The more A’s a school hands out after that point, the lower its rating in that category. Of course, this category would be just one of many used to rank schools, and colleges may optimize for other categories such as yield rates and graduation rates. Still, adding in such a category would at least introduce the incentive to crack down on grade inflation.

US News can learn from the Manhattan Institute, whose new college ranking system includes a criterion of “Curricular Rigor,” which assesses schools on their general education requirements. The system favors schools that “have resisted the temptation to transform the curriculum into a buffet from which students select whatever pleases them at the moment.” The next advance would be to include grade distributions as well.

Finally, state legislators may help, for they have the power to set general education guidelines for public institutions in the state. In Iowa, for instance, the House recently passed a law requiring survey courses in “western heritage” and “American heritage.” These requirements all but ensure that Iowa’s students will read the Constitution, Homer, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and more. Moreover, no special topics—narrow content-matter courses like the ones UCLA offers today—are allowed, nor is any course “that teaches identity politics or is based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, or privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States.” More state legislatures should follow the Iowa House’s lead.

Conclusion

The impulse to curb grade inflation is a good one, but it is incomplete without curriculum changes. Colleges must reintroduce rigor into their course offerings, especially in the humanities. An A should be hard to earn; the classics should be mandatory.

Before the compact, universities, let alone departments or individual professors, had no reason to make these changes. Now, they have little reason not to.

Mark Bauerlein is an emeritus professor of English at Emory University and an editor at First Things magazine.