I’m Watching the Sacrifice of College’s Soul; The New York Times, July 14, 2025

 Frank Bruni, The New York Times; I’m Watching the Sacrifice of College’s Soul

"At dinner recently with fellow professors, the conversation turned to two topics that have been unavoidable these past few years. The first was grade inflation — and the reality that getting A’s seldom requires any herculean effort and doesn’t distinguish one bright consultant-to-be from the next. Many students, accordingly, redirect their energies away from the classroom and the library. Less deep reading. More shrewd networking.gr

The second topic was A.I. Given its advancing sophistication, should we surrender to it? Accept that students will use it without detection to cull a semester’s worth of material and sculpt their paragraphs? Perhaps we just teach them how to fashion the most effective prompts for bots? Perhaps the future of college instruction lies in whatever slivers of mental endeavor can’t be outsourced to these digital know-it-alls.

And perhaps a certain idea of college — a certain ideal of college — is dying...

I’m not under the illusion that college used to be regarded principally in such high-minded terms. From the G.I. Bill onward, it has been held up rightfully as an engine of social mobility, a ladder of professional opportunity, yielding greater wealth for its graduates and society both.

But there was a concurrent sense that it contributed mightily to the civic good — that it made society culturally and morally richer. That feeling is now fighting for survival. So much over the past quarter century has transformed Americans’ relationship to higher education in ways that degrade its loftier goals. The corpus of college lumbers on, but some of its soul is missing."

Grade Inflation Nation; Inside Higher Ed via Slate, 3/29/16

Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed via Slate; Grade Inflation Nation:

"The first major update in seven years to a database on grade inflation has found that grades continue to rise and that A is the most common grade earned at all kinds of colleges...

The trends highlighted in the new study do not represent dramatic shifts but are continuation of trends that Rojstaczer and many others bemoan. He believes the idea of “student as consumer” has encouraged colleges to accept high grades and effectively encouraged faculty members to award high grades.

“University leadership nationwide promoted the student-as-consumer idea,” he said. “It’s been a disastrous change. We need leaders who have a backbone and put education first.”

Rojstaczer said he thinks the only real solution is for a public federal database to release information—for all college—similar to what he has been doing with a representative sample, but still a minority, of all colleges."

It’s not just Trump University; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 3/20/16

Jonathan Zimmerman, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; It’s not just Trump University:

"So it turns out that some teachers at Trump University pressed students to inflate scores on course evaluations, so the teachers would be rehired. But the same kind of thing has been happening for a long time at real American universities, not just at Donald Trump’s fake one.

That’s the real scandal here. We’ve turned our colleges into consumer-driven businesses, where student “satisfaction” is what matters most. And that makes the rest of us a lot more like Trump University than we’d care to admit.

Consider that over three-quarters of faculty in the United States are now “adjuncts,” meaning they work on short-term contracts (like Trump instructors) instead of on the tenure track. In 2014, a congressional study showed that a majority of adjunct faculty live below the poverty line. They drive from campus to campus, teaching multiple courses and sometimes even sleep in their cars.

And in most cases, they’re evaluated solely on student evaluations. Who can blame them for trying to gin up their scores? After all, their livelihoods are at stake."