THE HIDDEN COSTS OF GRADE INFLATION.

Monetary inflation can serve as a way of transferring resources. Suppose, for example, that policymakers perceive creditors as rich and debtors as poor. Rolling the presses, or having the central bank monetize the incremental debt, redistributes from rich to poor without the pain of having to impose taxes. In the university, grade inflation also serves to transfer resources, but in such a way as to deprive students in good standing of an opportunity to enroll in the major of their choice, through the use of progression requirements that provoke a mea culpa.

I know this because I wrote my department’s progression requirement, which prohibits students from declaring a history major before obtaining grades of at least C+ in a series of courses. Some departments require even higher grades to begin the major, and a few go as far at to require a certain cumulative GPA for continued good academic standing in the department. Why did I write our department’s progression requirements, and why did I push for their adoption? Because the professors in anthropology created their own first, and I did not want their “rejects” to scurry over into our major; so much for the love of teaching and a devotion to the success of all students.

Suppose for the sake of discussion that a C student is genuinely a C student. In that case, there's no reason to describe anthropology's "rejects" in those terms. The problem, as any faculty that has ever contemplated a policy of restricting enrollments understands, is that those notionally students in good standing are really D or borderline F students under any honest assessment of their performance.

Note, however, that administrators at Instapundit U. furrow their brows over departmental admission requirements for precisely the wrong reasons.

As part of our effort to improve student retention and graduation rates the provost asked me to meet with deans, department heads and professors to review departmental progression requirements. In these meetings I have heard many rationales, but mostly these defenses rely on narrow definitions of what constitutes success in a given field, and are exactly the kinds of explanations I employed to defend my department’s requirements. “Our students can’t be successful accountants without at least a 3.0,” or “our students tend not to pass the nutrition licensing examination on the first try if they have below a 3.0,” are typical responses. Both may be true, but who is to say that the students in question have to be accountants or licensed nutritionists? Could they not proceed to have happy and productive careers in fields outside of their major? Also, if there is a pattern where people with grades below a certain level tend to fail licensure exams, could we not simply publicize this so that students can make informed choices?

Again, Bastiat's "what is unseen" (for any humanities types, think "absent referent") strikes. It's apparently more important that students matriculated become students graduated, and preferably in their preferred course of study, than that students matriculated be college material. (I simply can't follow the logic about occupational licensing. Why do an accounting or nutrition degree if not to be able to sit for the certification. Aren't there progression requirements for the law school?)

Progression requirements are also appealing as a fast and easy way to demonstrate the rigor, high standards, and importance of an academic department (all of which I thought I was doing). As such they allow professors to ignore, diminish or at least supplement the real markers of a department’s reputation, which at a research university are publications and the quality of the graduate program, both of which require much more effort and excellence than the creation of progression requirements.

Apparently the writer never heard of opportunity cost, either. A small number of untalented but argumentative students can be much more of a time sink than the t-crossing and i-dotting inherent in polishing an article for publication, or sitting on the admissions committee and making the case for something resembling proper expectations of matriculants.

Neither has the concept of resource allocation occurred to him.

Of course there are good reasons for progression requirements, such as when they are employed to limit admission into a popular major which simply does not have sufficient personnel to teach well the growing number of majors. Yet even here there are problems, for departments can create scarcity by capping enrollment, by requiring a series of small enrollment seminars, or, and this is my favorite, by pointing to the standards of their accreditation agency. Such agencies can function as a protection racket by saying: “do it this way- — or else; teach no more than X students per class — or else.” Administrators are left to figure out how the agency derived the magic X number, and in the meantime many students admitted into the university have one less major available to them.

That headquarters might be denying resources to enrollment-impacted departments is yet another unseen thing. That departments might react to pressures to teach more sections per faculty member by requesting smaller classrooms sounds like optimization under constraint. That accreditation agencies might function as protection rackets does not surprise: that, after all, is the dirty little secret behind some pressures state institutions place on legislatures (cough up the resources to lower the student/faculty ratio lest North Central put us on probation) as well as the dispositions controversy whereby left politics becomes the content standard in teacher certification or social work. (I'm surprised, however, that the writer didn't call out the rigidities of tenure as a motive force behind restricted enrollments in temporarily overcrowded fields.)

Progression requirements produce what a colleague calls “academic boat people,” because these students drift from major to major even though they meet, and often exceed, the university’s general 2.0 GPA standard for continued enrollment. What are we to do with these students? What are we to tell parents when they complain that their child has a 2.4 GPA and yet cannot gain admittance into any of three preferred majors? Who should teach these students, and help them graduate? At my university such students become “undeclared majors,” and are transferred automatically into the College of Arts and Sciences. Do deans of the other colleges send flowers and chocolates in thanks of such generosity?

More to the point, does the provost release sufficient resources to Liberal Arts to offer sufficient sections for the additional students?

I'll risk an impertinence. Tell the parents "Your child's 2.4 would be a 1.8 under an honest grading system. We put the people with the least job security in the entry level courses and make their continued employment contingent on being evaluated favorably by their students. Under those circumstances, they may be tempted to purchase more favorable evaluations with more generous grading. In order to appear more productive, the classes are large and the grading is based on machine-read examinations assembled at random from publisher-supplied test banks of dubious validity."

Now, about those academic "boat people." Perhaps many of those students wind up in general studies under the rubric of Liberal Arts, or perhaps they drift to one of the Departments of Cooling Out the Mark. It's good for the retention rates, but it does little good either for the students or for the academy's standing with the general public.

The columnist, however, appears to believe in the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

And herein lies the problem: progression requirements are exclusionary. They keep people from pursuing their particular academic goals. They prevent students from specializing in a field of particular interest to them. Yes, budget constraints mean that universities sometimes cannot meet the demand for programs. But often such issues are absent, and yet progression requirements remain. Take it from a former progression requirement pusher: Such exclusion, as well meaning as it may be, prevents universities from fulfilling the call to educate our citizens. As such they should be eliminated when possible, reduced when feasible, and abandoned as a means of determining in advance who will and will not be successful in life.

Resources are scarce. They have competing uses. A fortiori, some potential users will be excluded. Perhaps it is intellectually more honest to advise some applicants that there is no place for them at the university, rather than to string them along with easy admission, inflated general education grades, and a cooling-out-the mark diploma in a field with little intellectual or professional content.