Grade Inflation in U.S. Higher Education Has a Long History

To the editor:

In “Grade Inflation: An Ahistorical Narrative” (Nov. 14, 2024), Richmann and Ramsey decry the lack of historical context when discussing “grade inflation.” It would be nice to have historians add some of this context, but they just … don’t. Instead, they get bogged down in arguments about things like the usefulness of grades to potential employers, the accurateness of grades for measuring student learning and what instructors “likely” did in the past (with no evidence behind the assertions). Historians wouldn’t seem to have any expertise in the first two points, and historians should be appalled at how that last point was handled.

Richmann and Ramsey prominently point out that grades haven’t been around all that long in higher education, only just about as long as we’ve had the research university, public universities in the U.S. or universities open to women or people of color. In other words, for the entire time we’ve had higher education as we understand it today. Grades may not have been around in medieval universities teaching the trivium and the quadrivium, but there’s almost nothing recognizable about higher education from that time, when the only doctoral degrees available were in medicine, law and theology and astronomy was a branch of mathematics and what we now call physics was a branch of philosophy that didn’t use math at all. (And, as historian John North has pointed out, a substantial fraction of students died before they could receive a degree.)

If you go to gradeinflation.com, a site generally near the top of the list when you search for “college grade inflation,” right near the top you see a real attempt at historical context. The fast rise of grades in the 1960s and early ’70s is attributed partially to the Vietnam War, when students might have been drafted into a deadly war if they left college. The rise in the late 80s through the ’00s is generally attributed to the “student as a consumer” era, and it does coincide with a rapid increase in tuition prices, in part due to public universities becoming increasingly reliant on tuition rather than state support. (This argument is bolstered by the fact that grade inflation is worse at private schools than public ones, which is at least correlated with how much the students are paying for their education.)

One could disagree with these arguments or propose alternatives, but Richmann and Ramsey don’t. They don’t engage with them at all. They dismiss this work as being “led by economists and statisticians,” as if these professions have no role in thinking about trends over time. In fact economics is a discipline very much based in history, and statisticians are experts in evaluating changes over time. They can make mistakes or miss historical context, certainly, but the way to deal with that is to respond to their actual arguments, not just dismiss them wholesale with ad hominem attacks.

It’s great that Richmann and Ramsey looked at a longer history of grading, but they did it at one single (private, Christian) university over a period of time [that] ends in 1960. This doesn’t seem very relevant to a conversation about a national trend that begins in the 1960s, but then, they aren’t statisticians.