When George Bush was running for president, some enterprising Yale journalists found out that he had a C+ average at Yale, where he graduated in 1968. He did about as well as Al Gore and John Kerry, who graduated from Harvard and Yale at roughly the same time. Commentators a generation ago cautioned that grade inflation meant a C+ in 1968 was roughly equivalent to a B+ by 1999—and we’ve had another quarter-century of inflation since then, so by the same measure, Bush’s C+ might now clear the bar for an A at either school. Not that the grades mean much anymore either way: a straight-A Yalie today may be weak on basic grammar, and who knows whether he’s ever seriously engaged with the history of America or Western civilization.

(Even the young Joe Biden might have earned a B+ at Yale in 2026. One fears that Biden, as he is now, might still manage a B-.)

Bush’s example tells us, by the by, that a C+ Yalie is perfectly capable of running the country. It helps, though, when the C+ Yalie knows he was only a C+ student—that knowledge breeds a useful humility. The C+ Yalie who thinks he’s an A student tends toward an unfounded arrogance when put in charge of things.

Grade inflation has gotten bad enough that Harvard is now considering an arbitrary cap on A grades. But even if they hold As to 20 percent of grades, it’s quite possible those As will be going to work that wouldn’t have earned a C+ in 1968. The rot runs deep enough that many professors may never have encountered genuinely good student work. Even at Yale, even at Harvard, something almost grammatical—produced without AI assistance—has become rare enough to inspire misplaced generosity.

I know that temptation from my own days grading college students. After all, I had to come up with curves for each exam that were sufficient to keep most of the class from failing. With essay grading, you get so happy about any sign of mental life and ability to write that you become generous with the As from sheer gratitude.

Grade with proper rigor—give no more than a C- to any essay that does not have perfect command of grammar, spelling, and punctuation—rather than just put a cap on As, and you’d flunk out a decent portion of the Ivies. You’d probably also flunk out large majorities of students in most other colleges, save a few Hillsdales. Practically speaking, it will probably take a few generations of grade deflation to get back to 1968. Teachers will need to relearn how to grade, just as students will need to relearn how to study and work.

Teachers will need to spend far more time grading. Teachers will need to spend far more time on undergraduate instruction, period, and not just fob off remedial writing to the Leninists in the composition departments. If we truly want to set in a regime of grade deflation, gleeful rigor, high admission standards, and mass flunking isn’t a sufficient answer. Professors will have to put in the hard work to make their students literate again.

Which is to say, it isn’t enough just to satirize and scorn the current generation of students. Sure, they could be a lot better students. But they have been failed—by several generations of teachers, of education administrators, of all of us Americans. We do need to eliminate grade inflation and grade more rigorously, but we should do so in a spirit of charity. And above all, we should make sure that professors work as hard to grade well as students work to deserve good grades. We all need to work together to fix what has gone wrong with college education, not just make students suffer for mistakes we made before they were born.

We need to work to deserve As in grading, just as our students need to work to deserve As on the work they turn in. Harvard and Yale have just as much call to put a cap on indifferent graders as they do on As.

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