Harvard’s Grade Inflation Fix
What both sides of the Harvard grading decision get right (and wrong) about higher education.
Posted May 25, 2026 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Harvard’s recent decision to cap the number of A grades in undergraduate courses is a welcome, albeit overdue, acknowledgment of a problem that has been festering for years: rampant grade inflation and the slow erosion of academic standards.
As a professor with nearly 30 years of experience across four different institutions, I have watched this decline with growing concern. What was once exceptional has become commonplace. In a national survey of faculty at public universities that my colleagues and I conducted, nearly 40 percent admitted to routinely inflating grades, and about one-third acknowledged watering down their course content in recent years.
This is not a healthy state for higher education .
A Post-Tribal Perspective
Today’s conversation about higher education is deeply tribal. Conservatives often see a system captured by ideological conformity ; sprawling diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies; and lowered standards. Liberals tend to fault corporatization and inequality while dismissing ideological critiques as mere partisan attacks. Both sides talk past each other as public trust continues to erode.
A post-tribal approach drops any “good guy/bad guy” framing and examines the structural and cultural forces producing outcomes no one wants: compressed grading, diminished rigor, and students studying less while earning higher GPAs.
On these issues, both sides have blind spots, but also important insights.
Conservatives have been right to sound the alarm on declining standards. They appropriately emphasize merit, hard work, and the need to restore real differentiation between strong and average performance. They are correct to push back against practices that weaken the signaling function of the college degree—whether through the prioritizing of "equity" over excellence or campus cultures that value ideological alignment over intellectual rigor. Traditional academic values of open inquiry, grit, and earned achievement need to be defended.
However, conservatives often go too far by glibly dismissing certain degrees as “worthless” or insisting that every major deliver immediate labor-market value. In an age of rapid artificial intelligence (AI), this narrow vocational focus misses the bigger picture. Countless jobs will be automated in the coming decades, prompting widespread economic precarity. Coupled with mounting debt, biodiversity loss, and other major ecological challenges, it’s clear that tying college opportunities to market demands is dangerously shortsighted. What society needs to weather these storms is a broadly cultivated citizenry equipped to navigate complex social, political, and technological challenges. Such a citizenry is inconceivable without a place for today’s youth—and tomorrow’s leaders—to be expected to engage deeply with philosophy , history, literature, and the social sciences.
Liberals are, hence, right to affirm higher education’s role in developing such a cultivated populace. They correctly contend that not every degree needs an immediate “return on investment” to benefit society. Yet many have been too quick to dismiss legitimate concerns about falling standards, grade inflation, and ideological conformity. When critics raise alarms about these matters, the response is often denial or accusations of bad faith rather than honest self-examination. This defensiveness has accelerated the loss of public trust in higher ed.
An important step liberal faculty must take is to endorse the idea of viewpoint diversity and actively incorporate it into their courses. A widely discussed 2025 working paper scanned millions of college syllabi and revealed a striking pattern: On highly contentious issues—such as racial disparities in criminal justice, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the ethics of abortion—students are overwhelmingly exposed to progressive perspectives, often with little to no engagement with credible dissenting voices.
In an era when these same issues deeply divide the public, such ideological narrowness carries real costs. Recent polling finds that roughly two-thirds of Democrats express confidence in higher education, compared to only about one-quarter of Republicans. When such a large portion of the public loses faith, the entire enterprise becomes vulnerable.
This isn’t about forced political balance for its own sake. It's about modeling intellectual honesty and equipping students with the tools to engage thoughtfully with opposing arguments.
Harvard’s move to limit A’s to roughly 20 percent per course (starting fall 2027) is a small but symbolically important step. Public universities, where most Americans are educated, should follow with similar courage.
Real solutions include a commitment to reclaiming traditional standards, reducing reliance on student evaluations for tenure and promotion, and fostering greater viewpoint diversity among faculty.
None of this requires choosing a political tribe. It requires choosing intellectual integrity over the comfort of unexamined certainty. The goal is not to defeat the other side but to recover a shared commitment to excellence—one where students are genuinely challenged, standards have real meaning, and higher education regains the public trust it has lost.
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Mark Horowitz, Ph.D., is an associate professor of sociology at Seton Hall University. He teaches and carries out research in political psychology, social theory, and the sociology of knowledge.
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