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Why on earth would this be remotely noteworthy to Tyler Cowen, an economist? Set aside the cultural stuff -- it's obviously just market dynamics at its core. Humanities degrees are -- rightly or wrongly -- not considered to benefit one's future livelihood, so a priori, they are not seen as being as valuable as others in a financial sense, which drives down enrollments in humanities classes. When enrollments go down, it becomes more difficult to make the case to resource-constrained universities that the department deserves the funding used to recruit and retain faculty and graduate students, etc. (It's already a hard case given that humanities departments are less likely to bring in lucrative outside grants than STEM departments.) So, the faculty sing a song, they do a dance -- that is, they make the class as fun and entertaining as possible -- and they give everyone A's afterward. Word gets out (sometimes in a very structured way, via student social network groups), and students enroll (sometimes whole sports teams will swarm a single humanities class). The classes don't get cancelled, and more sections are created, which creates jobs for the grad students as TAs. Some professors are extra eager to inflate grades, because they like the attention and/or they want a following, which boosts their prestige (merit being more subjective in the humanities than STEM, too), and who knows, maybe one day they'll get a book deal or an NPR interview because they taught a famously big class. Some professors don't really want to do it, but the department chair really needs to keep that enrollment up so the provost doesn't axe the whole department in next year's budget, and the grad students have to eat, and what they study is important, so they bear up and do it anyway, and just feel guilty afterward. It's a real phenomenon, and not good, but c'mon -- let's not pretend to be so shocked. (EDIT: And the students will be extra disappointed if they don't get that A that was all but advertised to them, so it's all the harder to ever right the ship. And at prestigious institutions, there's always that facile argument that "If you're smart enough to get into this school, of course you're going to be smart enough to get A's at this school!" And all universities want to keep their future alumni donors happy...) |
That aside, I don't think your explanation is good. There are many forces behind grade inflation. Some of them are safetyism, suspicion of inequality, cheating via the internet, widespread subjectivism (who's to say who's right or wrong?), and so on. Probably the biggest factor is affirmative action. Having accepted a large number of students for reasons other than their academic performance, it's not possible to simply give them worse grades. It would look bad. The result is high grades for everyone and the creation of pseudeo-academic disciplines where everyone gets an A.