There is a lot going on lately in the world of colleges and universities.
Harvard received a lot of attention lately with news that its faculty had approved a cap on the number of A grades that could be provided in each class.
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| Source: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/university-news/harvard-faculty-approve-a-cap-on-a-grades |
In 2025, a Harvard analysis found that solid A’s comprised 60 percent of all undergraduate letter grades up from just 24 percent in 2005.
Here is a sampling of the percentage of A's in some Harvard programs last year.
Seeing all those A's in Chemical and Physical Biology makes me believe that those Harvard professors are propping up the academic record of the Pre-Med majors.
However, it is in the Arts and Humanities that the greatest grade inflation has occurred.
80% of all grades given out in those divisions at Harvard were A's.
Harvard's average GPA was in the 2.5-2.7 range in the 1950's.
It had risen to 3.8 in 2022.
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| Credit: https://grimoiremanor.substack.com/p/will-grade-caps-improve-student-learning |
At the same time, more and more universities have realized that there elimination of standardized tests (such as the SAT and ACT) in the admission process was a big mistake.
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| Source: https://thecollegeinvestor.com/77443/colleges-are-requiring-sat-and-act-scores-again-heres-the-full-list-for-2027/?srsltid=AfmBOop_gB9aVWvx3IyYKYwQKTK22Xtj6IT5M-ID4Xv-kI5hnadLF582 |
The University of California system has not yet followed suit but hundreds of UC faculty in the STEM fields in particular have urged a return of the SAT and ACT in admission decisions.
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| Source: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-05-27/uc-math-professors-demand-return-of-sat-for-stem-admissions |
Without standardized testing in admissions, professors said they don’t know whether incoming students can handle college-level math. The open letter, addressed to top UC leaders, asks for SAT or ACT exams to be required beginning in fall 2027 and for STEM faculty to be given formal oversight of readiness standards in their majors.
“We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,” they warned.
At the beginning of the trend to do away with the SAT and ACT tests I predicted it would not end well.
The argument was that the tests were racist and not representative of how a student would perform in college.
This was despite reams of data over the years that proved the exact opposite.
As I pointed out in my blog post "The SAT Meets PC" in 2018, it also ignored the fact that the SAT was originally developed in order to level the playing field and provide a means for elite colleges to identify ability and aptitude in students that reached beyond the family connections and East Coast boarding schools that dominated Ivy League admissions before its introduction.
Using a standardized test that measured one's aptitude for college work leveled the playing field. It allowed schools to find overlooked talent who may not have had all the advantages of the prepsters on the East Coast.
It did not matter if you hailed from Michigan, Montana or Mississippi and did not have the same access to a quality high school education that the affluent had. The SAT showed whether you had the ability to do the work. The SAT also allowed admissions officers to objectively compare a student from the Choate School with students from Chillicothe, Ohio and South Central LA.
You can therefore argue that standardized testing has been one of the biggest factors allowing deserving, overlooked people to be recognized and receive opportunities to get ahead in the military, business and education sectors over the years. This led to millions being elevated in their class status in the United States.
In fact, it would be difficult to point to anything else that has had a bigger impact on improving class mobility and opportunity for deserving people over the last 75 years.
What was the real reason that the SAT, ACT and other standardized tests came under attack?
They were an obstacle for colleges and universities to admit who they wanted to admit.
The problem was that too many of those students were ill-prepared to do the work.
Connected to all of this we are now looking at increasing enrollment pressures for colleges in the coming years.
The number of 17 year olds, which is the primary pool for future college enrollees, will plummet over the next 15 years.
There will be 700,000 fewer 17 year olds in 2035 than there were in 2025.
At the same time, we are also seeing a massive shift in views regarding the importance of a college education.
Those views have largely been shaped by increases in college costs that have vastly outstripped household income and home purchase costs along with almost everything else.
This has resulted in more and more people to question the return on investment of a college education and that trend is likely to accelerate in concert with concerns about what effects AI will have on many college majors.
All of these facts will undoubtedly exert considerable financial pressures on mamy colleges over the next decade.
Colleges in the Northeast and Midwest will face the toughest environment due to a combination of a greater number of educational institutions and poorer demographics than in the South and West---excess supply and decreased demand---twin financial stressors.
Forbes magazine recently did a financial report card on small private colleges that were in the worst shape.
Schools like Hiram College, Baldwin Wallace University and Wittenberg University in my home state of Ohio were listed as those that were at high risk financially as were Rider University and Drew University in New Jersey.
Can schools like these survive the next 10 years?
Finally, take into account the fact that most colleges could not survive at all if it were not for the federal student loan program.
Federal student loans provide about $100 billion to colleges and universities annually.
The simple truth is that college costs could have never gone up at the rate they have without a supply of money to pay for it.
It is not a coincidence that college costs have gone up in lock step with the availability of student loan debt.
Student loan debt outstanding is $1.7 trillion compared to $400 billion 20 years ago.
Just as is the case with health care providers, colleges have become heavily dependent on the flow of federal money into the system.
As more student loan funds became available, the easier it became for colleges to raise tuition costs. Ironically, a program that was designed to assist students to afford college seems to be making it more unaffordable with each passing year.
The obvious conclusion is that increases in college costs and the debt supporting it are unsustainable longer term.
Over the next decade more and more colleges will have to deal with this reality.
The Big Beautiful Bill that passed last year in Congress had several provisions in it to encourage the highest cost colleges to reduce their prices.
This was done through the use of limits on student loans.
These limits were targeted most specifically at graduate/professional programs which have disproportionate levels of debt compared to their size.
Graduate school borrowers make up over 50% of all outstanding federal student loan debt but only represent 20% of the borrowers.
These are the limits of the amounts of federal student loans that can be borrowed compared to previous law.
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| Source: https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/an-analysis-of-the-one-big-beautiful-bill-acts-effect-on-student-loans/ |
There is no limit on students that secure private loans.
The new law also institutes a “do no harm” test for higher education. The law revokes a degree program’s eligibility for federal student loans if the earnings of its graduates are too low relative to the cost required to obtain a degree.
The provisions of the law take effect for new loans taken after July 1, 2026.
It appears the new rules are already having some effect on high college costs.
The University of California Irvine just announced it is reducing costs for its MBA programs to make them more accessible and affordable in reaction to the new loan limits.
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| Source: https://thecollegeinvestor.com/80372/uc-irvine-cuts-mba-tuition-to-99000-to-slip-under-new-federal-loan-cap/ |
The program cost reductions were $30,000 to $48,000.
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| Source: https://thecollegeinvestor.com/80372/uc-irvine-cuts-mba-tuition-to-99000-to-slip-under-new-federal-loan-cap/ |
All of this raises question as to how it is that UC Irvine decided they could charge so much with federal student loans picking up the tab but not so much when that money was no longer an option?
We can only hope that this is the beginning of a trend.
However, the overriding trend is that colleges are going to be in for a challenging decade ahead.
It is likely that in ten years the higher education landscape will look a lot different than it does today.
