If Failure is Impossible, What's the point of Success?

Walter Williams, of George Mason University's Economics department, wants to know.

According to a recent essay by Williams, the worth of a college degree is dropping almost by the day. While academic achievement scores are consistently dropping across the nation, our collective GPA seems to get better and better. Why?

"What is being labeled grade inflation is simply a euphemism for academic dishonesty. After all, it's dishonesty when a professor assigns a grade the student did not earn. When a university or college confers a degree upon a student who has not mastered critical thinking skills, writing and problem-solving, it's academic dishonesty. Of course, I might be in error calling it dishonesty. Perhaps academic standards have been set so low that idiots could earn A's and B's."

Williams goes on to point out specific instances where grade-inflation has weakened the meaning of a degree -- even from some of the most prestigious schools in the country.

"In October 2001, the Boston Globe published an article entitled "Harvard's Quiet Secret: Rampant Grade Inflation." The article reported that a record 91 percent of Harvard University students were awarded honors during the spring graduation. The newspaper called Harvard's grading practices "the laughing stock of the Ivy League."

Harvard is by no means unique. For example, 80 percent of the grades given at the University of Illinois are A's and B's. Fifty percent of students at Columbia University are on the Dean's list. At Stanford University, where F grades used to be banned, only 6 percent of student grades were as low as a C. In the 1930s, the average GPA at American colleges and universities was 2.35, about a C plus; today the national average GPA is 3.2, more than a B."

The reason why colleges would be willing to let academic standards fall so low? In Williams' opinion, it mostly has to do with the "rankings" of schools that have become so important in the eyes of some administrators.

And this is a problem throughout the college system, not just at the upper-most tier. In four years at Fairfield University, I saw plenty of people, many of whom probably shouldn't have been admitted in the first place, passing classes with the kind of ease that made me question the value of my own success. What significance is a college degree, even a college degree with honors, if it is simply handed out to anyone who paid the money and stuck around for four years? The only thing colleges can really control is their academic standards, but it appears that far too many of them have let other considerations get in the way.

Regardless of the reason, this trend has destroyed the value of a bachelor's degree (while the price of said degree has gone through the roof), and that's bad for everyone involved.