Grade inflation, self-grading, and DEI indoctrination have gutted academic standards at American universities.
By: Rebekah Wanic
Published: Mar 18, 2026
For decades, American higher education sold itself as the gold standard of intellectual rigor and preparation for adult life. Parents mortgaged homes, students took on debt, and taxpayers funded massive subsidies on that promise. Instead, a large segment of the professoriate has betrayed that mission through laziness, self-preservation, and hard-left ideological capture, manifesting in three damning practices: easy As, student self-grading, and the metastasis of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) indoctrination across the curriculum.
Perhaps the most visible symptom of this betrayal is low standards and rampant grade inflation.
Between 1990 and 2020, average GPAs at four-year public and nonprofit universities rose by more than 16 percent—from 2.81 to 3.15. Despite nearing the ceiling, the trend continues. Harvard’s internal data for 2024–25 shows more than 60 percent of undergraduate grades were As, with the median graduating GPA now at 3.83. Yale awarded As or A-minuses for nearly 80 percent of grades in 2022–23.
Today’s students are no smarter or better prepared than those of previous generations, however. At UC San Diego, for instance, large numbers of incoming freshmen test below middle-school math levels despite high school transcripts padded with As. Rigorous grading demands real effort—designing meaningful assessments, providing substantive feedback, defending standards against complaints, and absorbing the hit to student-evaluation scores. But since handing out As is far easier and safer, many professors abandon their educational mission and instead keep the customers—students and their tuition-paying parents—happy.
A companion to this lack of rigor is the ridiculous trend called student self-grading.
Once confined to experimental pedagogy blogs, self-assessment of assignments, participation, or even entire courses is now touted in outlets like Inside Higher Ed as empowering and innovative. Professors who adopt it claim students learn more by reflecting on their own work. In reality, the practice actually outsources the hardest part of the job—objective evaluation—to the least qualified people on campus. And it is self-serving. Why spend hours crafting rubrics, grading papers, or justifying marks when students can simply award themselves points for effort, freeing faculty from the burden entirely?
This abdication is the opposite of education. It erodes any sense of external accountability, rewards self-delusion, and leaves graduates shocked when employers demand real performance. Students do not learn more by grading themselves; they learn that effort and outcomes are whatever they declare them to be.
Perhaps most corrosive of all is the explosion of DEI ideology, which has replaced merit as the organizing principle of university life. Under the DEI regime, faculty are hired on the basis of skin color or gender rather than academic qualifications. Balanced lectures and genuine debate have largely been abandoned as ideologically captured faculty use their posts to preach their own views as fact, assign activist readings, and reward ideological conformity with high grades. Graduates leave not merely unskilled at evidence-based reasoning, but profoundly ignorant of their own country’s history—and in many cases, having spent four years being cultivated toward contempt for America and its Western heritage. (Read Patrick Deneen’s, “How a Generation Lost Its Common Culture.“)
Defenders of the status quo blame consumer demand, administrative pressure, and culture wars—all of which pose real challenges. But faculty control the curriculum, assessments, and classroom climate, and tenured professors enjoy extraordinary job security precisely to resist such pressures. Too many have instead taken the path of least resistance: inflating grades to buy peace, outsourcing evaluation to students to save time, and indulging in political advocacy to signal virtue to like-minded peers. Good teaching is exhausting. It demands rigor over popularity, honesty over comfort, and standards over self-interest. The modern professoriate, by and large, has declined that challenge.
Students deserve better. Employers and society deserve better. Until faculty reclaim their mission to educate rather than coddle or convert, higher education will continue betraying the very people it claims to serve.