This is a good-news, bad-news tale for American higher education. The good news: A top-tier university has finally taken serious aim at the epidemic of grade hyperinflation. The bad news: We have fallen so far that even elite institutions must now devise entirely new, parallel evaluation systems just to deliver what straightforward, principled grading should have provided all along.
For too long, professors nationwide have failed to award the grades students actually deserve. They’ve chosen easy A’s and B’s to keep enrollments high, student evaluations glowing, and their own lives conflict-free. This abdication of responsibility has hollowed out academic integrity from the inside, leaving honest assessment in tatters, and forcing creative institutions like Brandeis to scramble for workarounds.
Brandeis’s “Plan to Reinvent the Liberal Arts” is a well-intentioned, heavily funded effort that, regrettably, underscores just how broken the system has become. Rather than confront grade inflation head-on, Brandeis is building an elaborate second layer of credentials to compensate for the first layer’s debasement.
Grade inflation is no harmless campus eccentricity. It is a slow-motion catastrophe that has turned college transcripts into worthless Monopoly money, robbing students of genuine learning and crippling workforce competitiveness.
I’ve documented this decline for years: As of the latest available data from 2023, roughly 45–47% of grades at four-year colleges are A’s—triple the 15% seen in the early 1960s. The fallout is as devastating as it is predictable. Employers no longer trust GPAs as reliable signals of ability. Graduate admissions offices struggle to distinguish real talent from inflated records. Worst of all, students are profoundly cheated: They walk away convinced they’re exceptional when many are not, ill-equipped for a world that refuses to hand out participation trophies.
At its core, grade inflation is a profound moral failure. It lies to employers. Far more destructively, it lies to the very students universities exist to serve. It whispers in their ears, “Life is easy,” hard work and real excellence are optional, and average performance will still earn top marks. The incentives are perverse and self-reinforcing: Faculty who maintain rigorous standards watch enrollments shrink and student evaluations tank; those who dispense A’s buy peace, protect their enrollment numbers, and keep the machine humming. The entire enterprise has drifted into comfortable mediocrity because almost no one is willing to be the one who says, “No.”
Texas, however, is refusing to play along. In May 2025, the Texas House of Representatives passed House Bill 4234—a direct, uncompromising strike against the problem. The bill (which did not get a vote in the Texas Senate) mandates that public colleges and universities place the average (or median) class grade right next to each student’s individual grade on the official transcript.
No new documents. No microcredentials. No second transcripts. Just illuminating honesty embedded in the credential students already carry.
This Texas approach is radically simpler, cheaper, and more powerful than layered alternatives. It doesn’t invent a workaround; it fixes the broken tool we already have. It exposes grade inflation instantly and inescapably—every employer, every graduate school, every parent can see at a glance whether a student’s A was earned in a sea of A’s or stood out in a tougher environment. It demands accountability without micromanaging faculty or rewriting curricula. It restores the original transcript’s meaning rather than abandoning it.
Brandeis’s plan, launched in September 2025 under President Arthur Levine, is serious: faculty-endorsed, with
$25 million committed, focused on durable skills and experiential learning. Levine deserves our admiration and gratitude for his courage. The effort is both pragmatic and serves as a painful reminder of how deeply the grading culture has decayed that such complex detours are now required.
Public faith in higher education is collapsing. Levine predicts that demographic realities threaten to close 20–25% of colleges. In this crisis, we cannot afford half-measures or elaborate Band-Aids. We need reforms that confront the rot directly.
Texas’s HB 4234 offers exactly that: a clean, transparent, no-excuses fix that puts truth back into the transcript itself. It is elegant in its directness and devastating in its honesty. If enacted, it would set a national standard—proving that the most effective way to end grade inflation is not to build around it, but to expose it.
The real tragedy is that any workaround is necessary at all. Honest grading by principled professors would have made these elaborate fixes unnecessary. Until more faculty find it in themselves to award the grades students have actually earned, workarounds will remain essential. But Texas is showing there is a better path.
Supporters of HB 4234 hope to push it across the finish line in the next legislative session. Texas has the chance to lead—not by inventing new systems, but by demanding the old one tell the truth.
That is the reform higher education urgently needs.
