Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
In 2005, a quarter of Harvard students received A’s. In 2025, it’s over 60%. At Yale, A’s went from 67% of grades in 2010 to 78% of grades in 2023.
If you believe the numbers, Harvard students are smarter than ever. But Harvard doesn’t believe them which is why it issued a report warning about ‘grade inflation’ and urging more rigorous academics. And the leaders of tomorrow responded by crying that asking them to study was bad for their mental health.
One student complained that after the report “the whole entire day, I was crying” while another whined that she couldn’t “reach my maximum level of enjoyment just learning the material because I’m so anxious about the midterm, so anxious about the papers… if that standard is raised even more, it’s unrealistic to assume that people will enjoy their classes.”
That unrealistic standard is one where 60% of students already receive A’s.
The prestigious university has had awkward moments like before, such as when 91% of students graduated with honors in 2001, and these days it tries to keep the number of honors graduates in the 50s. But much like shopping in a supermarket, it’s hard to avoid the inevitable recognition of inflation when looking at the 3.8 GPA that’s the floor for most Harvard seniors.
At Yale, the average GPA is 3.7 and a cutoff was implemented to keep the number of honors graduates at 30%. Anything else would make Yale seem as ridiculous as Harvard.
Like Lake Wobegon, Harvard students, no matter how dumb, are always above average.
But at Yale, students turned brilliant so rapidly that you would have thought they were getting the Flowers for Algernon treatment. From 2010 onwards, grade averages rose a point every semester, going from 67 in 2010 to 73 in 2019, but COVID really boosted IQs so fast that in 2020-2021, nearly 82% of grades were A’s. Who knew lockdowns made for geniuses.
But whatever the average intelligence of the average Yale student may be, it’s clear that at least part of the problem lay with grade inflation in worthless woke courses. While 55% of Mathematics, 62% of Chemistry and 67% of Physics grades were A’s, 82% of Black Studies, 85% of Education Studies and 92% of Women’s Studies were A’s. Maybe students taking woke courses are smarter than the mathematicians and physicists of tomorrow. But probably not.
At Harvard, 60% of engineering grades were A’s, as were 65% of science grades, and 73% of ‘Arts and Humanities’. Across institutions, the highest levels of grade inflation tend to be happening in the social sciences and other dogma ridden fields.
The pattern of worthless grades in worthless courses kicking into high gear during and after COVID holds up at colleges in general.
At the University of California Berkeley, 77% of grades in 2020 were A’s. While that number fell down to 64% in 2022, the more woke and worthless the subject, the worse its grades were inflated.
Journalism hit 95% of A’s in 2022, and if you were under the mistaken impression that ‘environmental design’ was a serious field, both it and Black Studies offered 78% A’s. However Math offered only 42% A’s and Physics only managed 41% A’s. Those poor dumb idiots trying to understand the nature of the universe just can’t compete with those studying the “critical frameworks that articulate, explore, describe and/or impinge upon blackness.”
As a result UC Berkeley students majoring in Applied Mathematics, Chemical Engineering and Physics had GPA’s in the 3.4 range while the highest GPAs went to students majoring in art, conservation and society.
Are these worthless grades impressing anyone?
Stuart Rojstaczer, a Fortune 500 consultant and expert on grade inflation, tells companies to “look at anything less than an A or an A-minus as a fail.”
Keeping up with grade inflation is challenging. At Brown, in the 2020-21 academic year, 67% of grades were A’s — up from 39% in 1993.” But that’s not good enough. Back in 2018, Brown’s 3.73 GPA ruled the roost, but these days it’s been overtaken by Harvard and Yale.
Still maybe we’re being unfair and the rise in wokeness and AI made students smarter.
We could look at the SATs where scores have been slowly drooping downward over the years, until the redesign in 2016 that dumbed it down sent scores soaring upwards again. Or we could look at the growth of remedial courses for incoming college freshmen.
At the University of California San Diego, 1,000 incoming students needed to take remedial math courses. In a remedial class, 1 in 4 could not correctly answer what ‘7 + 2 = [_] + 6’.
Around a quarter of incoming college freshmen have to attend remedial classes. And it’s not just at community colleges. Even Harvard now offers remedial math classes to its geniuses.
From what was once a gold standard, the worth of an Ivy League education has dropped so badly that you would need to qualify for remedial math courses to value it highly.
Why does any of this matter to those of us who aren’t spending the price of a luxury car to be able to put Harvard or Yale on our resumes? It matters because for the last century, we’ve been ruled by the handpicked elites whose CVs with Ivy League labels on them implied that they were above average and more fit to lead the country when they actually don’t know anything.
We let these people run the economy, foreign policy and tell us what to do because they were billed as ‘experts’. Their actual expertise was in getting A’s for effort.
The Ivy League was supposed to produce a meritocratic nobility, instead it’s giving us woke idiots who can’t read or count, but can recite back the political dogma that they have been indoctrinated with. Their only actual qualifications are political, not educational.
America is being run into the ground by radical idiots with worthless degrees. If we’re going to wreck our country by letting idiots run it, we could at least save money on the cost of their miseducation.
