Meet Students Where They Are? Maybe Not.

A moral injunction popular in today’s academy is to “meet students where they are.” The idea appears unimpeachable. If educators encounter students incapable of meeting the course expectations of prior years (exacerbated, perhaps, by pandemic learning loss), what sense does it make to teach over their heads? Aren’t we responsible for ensuring that all students at least learn something, even if that means adjusting our expectations? And would it not be patently unfair, not to mention elitist, to tailor instruction to a minority of bright students while the majority fall behind or fail?

These concerns are compassionate, but they are ultimately misguided. Giving in to them will continue to erode the legitimacy of the college degree.

According to a recent Pew survey, only 22 percent of the public still believes a college degree is worth it if it entails taking out loans, while nearly half of the public believes a degree is less important today than it was in the past. There are a variety of reasons for such public perception. But the likelihood that more and more students are graduating today without comparatively higher skills than their peers who lack college degrees is likely part of the reason. Accordingly, employers and state governments are increasingly dropping formal educational requirements for jobs. If the college degree continues to lose its traditional function of signaling competency and grit, the outlook will be grim for a higher-ed system largely financed by student debt.

This pessimism is bolstered by the results of a national survey of faculty my colleagues and I published in 2023. Pluralities of professors (close to half) in large public universities affirm that academic standards have declined in recent years and that grade inflation is a serious problem. Almost 40 percent acknowledge routinely inflating grades; one-third admit to reducing the difficulty of their courses.

These problems are likely intractable under current market and cultural conditions. Revenue deficits, state cutbacks, rising student debt, and anticipated enrollment cliffs all encourage bottom-line practices like the proliferation of adjunct instruction, an amenities “arms race” to attract students, and the elimination of programs for low enrollment. In this fiscal context, it is hardly surprising that appeals to high academic standards take a back seat (or perhaps no seat at all) to concerns over student enrollment and retention. Yesterday’s standards may be a luxury that colleges cannot afford today.

For students entering college in 2024, nearly 90 percent of four-year colleges in the United States were either test-optional or test-free. Except for a handful of elite institutions, there is little indication that the flight from standardized testing will reverse. The ink spilled justifying test-optional policies on equity grounds could fill a flume, and questioning such policies appears both heartless and increasingly incompatible with colleges’ social-justice mission.

Fiscal pressures on colleges coupled with the egalitarian sensibilities of administrators and professors may render irresistible the shift toward increasingly open admissions. Indeed, it is unfeasible for the large majority of colleges to return to standardized testing or to toughen their admissions requirements. I have heard from colleagues at moderately selective colleges that administrators warn of dire enrollment declines should they reinstitute admissions tests. It is not surprising, therefore, that even when the faculty holds its ground on testing, as at the University of California system, their recommendation goes unheeded.

A third of professors in our survey admit to watering down their courses in recent years; we suspect that many more will have to dilute their syllabi in the future. This is an expected outcome of the decades-long massification of higher ed — now on turbo with the elimination of admissions tests — which has been intensified by the flood of students admitted with increasingly inflated high-school grades. It is especially concerning that grades in high school continue to rise as test scores fall: Falling test scores dovetail with evidence that the average intellectual ability of college students has declined over the decades to around the population average today. Future student bodies will therefore be ever more unprepared or ill-equipped for the minimal demands of college.

Regrettably, responses to current trends threaten to dissolve even those minimal demands. Although college degrees are not, strictly speaking, public goods, their spillover benefits to society will diminish as course credits become mere commodities for sale. We cannot know from a single survey how far standards have already collapsed in the classroom, but there is cause for alarm. Apart from some elite institutions, it is simply not to colleges’ comparative advantage — nor in the interest of academic programs, or even professors — to staunchly defend academic standards.

The introduction of artificial intelligence into this regime of perverse incentives is likely to accelerate the decline of academic standards even further. The long-run outcome may be the depletion of the college degree’s value to society. Imagine the following scenario, far from unrealistic:

A cadre of professors, fed up with bogus papers, strive to maintain traditional standards by rigorously grading strictly in-class writing assignments. They face intense resistance from students. To avoid the headaches, and the hit to their teaching evaluations, they reduce workloads and inflate grades. In the meantime, given the obvious rewards tied to research, more careerist professors either avoid assigning papers altogether or they blithely slap A’s on robot-written work. Eventually those faculty members, beloved as they are by their student-consumers, “outperform” the more principled faculty by current metrics (plump course enrollments, increased research output, and rosy student evaluations). Faculty members who conscientiously stick to yesterday’s standards get weeded out in time or learn to play the game. And we arrive, alas, at the junk degree — available in many flavors in a vending machine near you.

That might sound hyperbolic, but under present conditions the college classroom cannot long maintain its rigor. Fewer than a quarter of the faculty members we surveyed expressed optimism about the future of higher education. About half of them link eroding standards to declining student readiness; two in five would not be surprised if their university were graduating some functionally illiterate students!

Can anything be done to change course? How might the college degree’s signaling function and value be protected?

Although these prospects are hardly likely, here are a few suggestions for how to right the ship:

• Eliminate student teaching evaluations as we know them or remove them as a requirement for tenure. We have known for years that students’ ratings of faculty members bear no relationship to their actual learning. Course ease and faculty attractiveness are among the strongest predictors of student satisfaction. Any hope of renewing rigor in the classroom will require insulating professors from these popularity contests. Much better would be student reports of observable faculty behaviors, such as arriving to class on time, responding promptly to student queries, and providing feedback on written work.

• Restructure teaching assessments on the tenure track around professor inputs rather than student outputs. This may include evidence of rigorous assigned work and exams, evidence of the depth and breadth of written comments to students, and reflections on efforts to sustain standards. Faculty grade distributions should be part of the conversation as well. Some professors resist grading transparency on the grounds of academic freedom. Yet such a move at the department level would keep faculty on notice should their habitually inflated grades be out of step with student performance: Almost a third of professors in our sample admit to feeling frustration at colleagues who routinely give A’s.

• Reinstate admissions tests. They have always been solid predictors of college success alongside high-school GPA. But with widespread grade inflation, they are needed now more than ever. Under current circumstances, the only way to reinstate testing is by an agreement of a large-enough consortium of institutions willing to collectively shoulder the risk of lost enrollments. Ideally, that would entail a shift in administrative outlook away from perpetual growth in enrollment and faculty lines, toward scrupulous stewardship of existing resources.

• Keep grading. This concern may seem facetious, but there are increasing calls to replace traditional grades with purely narrative evaluations and feedback. Appearing under varied labels (e.g., “ungrading,” “alternative grading,” “specs grading”), the aims are compassionate and progressive. Advocates claim that grades are biased, perpetuate inequities, sap intrinsic motivation, and poorly reflect student ability. I do not have the space to offer a full rebuttal here. Suffice to note that whatever the purported gains in enhanced motivation and learning, I suspect the agenda is to socially promote students from disadvantaged backgrounds, whatever their capacities. Ironically, supporters of ungrading point to rampant grade inflation as a reason to get rid of grades, rather than attending to the pressures that inflate grades in the first place. This is like an obese person throwing away the scale rather than fixing their diet.

Some may find these suggestions elitist or callous. But if my prognosis about the state of higher education is correct, it is certainly not compassionate to saddle graduates with mountains of debt and minimal marketable skills. With the rise of AI and grave economic and ecological challenges ahead, not to mention mounting competition from Asia, will our graduates’ future employers “meet them where they are”?