How bad is grade inflation in the humanities? So bad that when U.S. News & World Report issued its annual college rankings last week, it gave more credit to schools for graduating students in math and the hard sciences than it did in other disciplines. According to the publication’s press release: “U.S. News made a slight change in the methodology for National Universities to better predict graduation rates. In determining whether a school is graduating students at the expected level, U.S. News incorporated the proportion of degrees awarded in the science, technology, engineering and math fields. This was done to better reflect research showing that students in STEM fields generally graduate at lower rates compared with those in other majors.”
What does this mean? U.S. News determines the quality (and rank) of a school not simply using its actual graduation rate but its expected graduation rate. This is calculated based on a variety of factors, including what type of school it is and who its students are—whether the school is public or private, how many students receive Pell grants, and their average SAT scores. This is not entirely unreasonable. It may sound a bit like the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” but it’s also true that consumers want to know the value added when they are deciding on a school. Sure, there are elite schools that graduate almost all their students, but if the kids are mostly coming from upper-class families and attended high-quality suburban high schools, the high graduation rate seems a little less impressive.
This slight change has already had big implications for the rankings. According to Robert Morse, chief statistician at U.S. News, it is “one reason why MIT moved to tie at No. 5 with Columbia and Stanford and why additional schools like California Institute of Technology, Virginia Tech, and Colorado School of Mines also improved in the 2018 rankings.” He adds, “It’s important to note that outcomes measures—graduation rate, graduation rate performance, and freshman retention rates—are the most heavily weighted factors in our methodology at 30 percent. We strongly encourage prospective students and their families to pay close attention to graduation and retention rates because these indicate whether a school is financially and academically supporting its students through graduation.”
By rejiggering the rankings formula in this way, Morse and his colleagues emphasize the importance of these factors to their readers. U.S. News is giving schools more credit for graduating STEM majors than for graduating people in the humanities or social sciences because, well, it’s harder to successfully get students through a STEM curriculum than to teach them sociology and English literature—at least as these latter majors are currently formulated.
This fact is obvious to anyone who has gone to college in the past 40 years. According to a 2016 study by Stuart Rojstaczer, a former Duke University professor, and Christopher Healy, a Furman University professor, GPAs at four-year schools are rising at the rate of 0.1 points per decade and have been doing so for 30 years. A’s are the most common grade awarded. In fact, they are three times more common than they were in 1960. Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute notes that the most popular explanation of this trend is the Vietnam war. Professors started to give higher grades so that students wouldn’t fail and be drafted.
But this trend did not affect all disciplines in the same way. According to a 2010 paper that Rojstaczer and Healy wrote for Teachers College Record, “Nationally for all colleges and universities, science departments grade on average roughly 0.4 lower on a 4.0 scale than humanities departments and 0.2 lower than social science departments.”
Why is there such a significant gap? Hess notes that grade inflation is simply easier to accomplish “in courses that are built around subjective measures like essays and class participation. In courses where the bulk of grades are right and wrong answers the curve is unforgiving.” But he also thinks it has something to do with the “ideology of the faculty.” Humanities and social science professors are more likely to be liberal and think “about power differentials.” “One of the arguments against giving low grades is it makes inequities bigger.” In the humanities, in other words, more professors are bleeding hearts.
But this disparity in grading has had unintended consequences—most importantly that students are less inclined to major in STEM fields once they realize how tough the grading can be. A 2013 paper by Ralph Stinebrickner and Todd R. Stinebrickner from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that “students enter school quite optimistic/interested about obtaining a science degree, but that relatively few students end up graduating with a science degree.” While the authors note, “The substantial overoptimism about completing a degree in science can be attributed largely to students beginning school with misperceptions about their ability to perform well academically in science,” the truth may not be that they are unqualified. Rather they have learned that they will have to work much harder to get the same grade than they would in the humanities.
This is not simply a question of laziness. Colleges are sending students a message: Your work in the humanities and social sciences will pay off while your work in the hard sciences does not appear to do so. Or at least not to the same extent.
Not only do these perverse incentives discourage people from going into the fields where they are most likely to find well-paying jobs (and not incidentally the fields where they are most likely to learn something substantive). It also has a disparate impact. A study last year from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce found that black students are less likely to pursue lucrative majors than their white peers: “African Americans account for only 8 percent of general engineering majors, 7 percent of mathematics majors, and only 5 percent of computer engineering majors.” Meanwhile, they are overrepresented in lower-paying fields like “human services and community organization (20%) and social work (19%).”
Some experts have suggested that this is in part the result of the “mismatch” problem created by universities through affirmative action—that is, admitting minority students who are less academically prepared than their white peers and then steering them into easier majors so they will be able to remain enrolled. The other factor here is clearly the vast difference between grading in the humanities and social sciences and grading in the hard sciences.
If we want students who are from lower-income households or those from groups that have been historically oppressed to go into better-paying professions (and break free from the intergenerational poverty trap that we hear so much about), maybe we should give them a fighting chance. Right now, these kids would be foolish to choose a low GPA in chemistry (and risk failing) when they know they could earn all As and Bs in women’s studies.
How much does it matter that U.S. News has changed its formula? In the 30 years since the magazine began publishing its annual rankings, there is no doubt it has completely altered the field of college admissions. The fact that U.S. News calculated a selectivity rate, for instance, encouraged schools to get more students to apply (even if they weren’t really qualified) so that schools could claim they were being more selective and admitting only a tiny percentage of applicants. Many students these days apply to more than a dozen schools; a couple of decades ago it might have been only three or four. You can blame U.S. News for that.
This new weight placed on STEM graduation rates looks like a fairly small correction. But Elizabeth Akers, coauthor of a book called Game of Loans: The Rhetoric and Reality of Student Debt, notes: “Historically, schools would have wanted to push students away from STEM to keep up their graduation rates. Now, schools have no incentive to move kids away from low grad rate majors because they aren’t ‘dinged’ for it in the rankings.” Let’s hope consumers of higher education (not to mention its producers) take notice.
Naomi Schaefer Riley, a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, is the author of The New Trail of Tears: How Washington Is Destroying American Indians.
