In 1972, a senior at the University of Wisconsin told Iver Peterson of The New York Times what had been on many students’ minds: “I never go to school anymore, and I still get wonderful grades. There’s a common consensus here that it’s a lot easier to get good grades.” The article was featured on the Times’ front page and, within days, provoked a flurry of controversy. In it, Peterson quoted David Riesman, a Harvard sociologist who passionately declared that we were witnessing “grade inflation.” Today, Riesman’s term is ubiquitous for good reason. Where the most common grade awarded in 1972 was a C, it is now an A. Schools like Harvard and Yale confer roughly 80 percent A’s and others have scrapped traditional grading altogether. To us at UChicago, this might read like fantasy. Indeed, UChicago’s average GPA actually declined for most of the 20th century. When it finally did increase, it was at a far more modest rate than its peers. Although you may look longingly at the easy A’s of the Ivies, I am here to urge you to count yourself lucky. The prospect of effortless success feels tempting, but I doubt you will like what comes with it. 

Grade inflation is merely the tip of the iceberg. Higher education has seen remarkable changes since its inception and grade inflation is a small, readily observable symptom of an industrial-scale commodification of the university. Consider the first universities, the likes of Oxford and Bologna, which sprung up in late medieval Europe as avenues to self-actualization and enlightenment for fortunate-enough Europeans. In those times, professional education was left to the guilds and apprenticeship systems. W.E.B. Du Bois lent grandeur to this vision of higher education: “The final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brick mason, but a man.” Du Bois’s commentary, penned in 1903, was a disapproving reaction to the changes he witnessed in higher education. 

As industrialization marched forward, industrial needs followed closely—needs that the universities were, in large part, tasked with fulfilling. Land-grant universities, through the Morrill Act of 1862, were charged by the federal government with teaching industrial disciplines. Within the year, MIT and other technically-oriented schools like it also appeared to cater to these economic and technological developments. Certain universities even partnered with industrial companies directly. The industrial-era university was moving away from the “pursuit of happiness” and gearing up for the “pursuit of dollars,” as author Michael Roth put it. Hardly anyone ever looked back. 

When Riesman began his inquiry, three-quarters of freshmen said it was essential to develop a meaningful philosophy of life, and about a third felt the same about being well-off financially. Now those fractions have flipped. “Business and Commerce” became the most popular major and the most frequent reason for attending college became “getting a better job.” What did it used to be? “Learning about the things that interest me.” As their incentives changed, so did colleges. 

Behind a grandiose vision for education, most colleges are nothing more than “supermarkets where students are shoppers and professors are merchants,” as the American Association of Colleges and Universities put it. Glossy brochures boast new dining halls, dorms that look like hotels, and an assortment of buzzwords around career success. Colleges market themselves like products because, secretly, they are. Admission rates have fallen precipitously while “flunking” students is no longer acceptable. Nobel Prize winner Michael Spence based his signaling theory on the astute observation that, in today’s world, college is about signaling competence by virtue of admission, not acquiring it through a rigorous education. From the moment a student is admitted, college is meant to provide success to its customers— just like any other product. Sometimes success is defined as a six-figure finance job, but to others it might be measured in “beer and circus,” according to Murray Sperber. There are some who deem it to be the coveted “college experience,” and others who clamor to be associated with a winning sports team. Either way, one thing is for sure: it is no longer learning. 

Is it really so surprising that, as learning and rigor have fallen out of favor in higher education, our society’s metric for learning is becoming increasingly unserious? For the many students simply looking for a degree, a job, and a good time, bad grades and hard classes are unwelcome. George Leef, director of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, writes, “Leaders at most colleges know that if they don’t satisfy their student-customers, they will find another school that will.” The result? Grades rise ever higher, but learning does not. 

In this, UChicago is an exception. As the university-industrial complex began in earnest, John D. Rockefeller and William Harper pursued a unique vision of higher education. Harper publicly condemned the narrowing conception of college that elite schools were embracing. He favored a more holistic framework that balanced professional instruction with a personal, formative education–“a life that forms a complete whole.” This view was repeated by Michael Randel over a century later, in 2006, when he defined the school’s goal as “exploiting a certain quality of mind and not acquiring what might more properly be called ‘skills.’” 

UChicago has long been devoted to a “completeness” of education that includes subjects far beyond the scope of careers—enrichment beyond the monetary sense. A farmer reading the classics or an industrial worker quoting Shakespeare, as a writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education quipped, sounds like a sign of a healthy republic and of an engaged and intelligent citizenry—not of a wasted, non-monetized education. One might ask themselves if there is nothing more to life and learning than their job. Must everything you do and learn be monetized? I certainly do not think so. Even to those in search of six figures, the new college model is bad news. A study at Brown University found that students who were placed in more rigorous classes with more demanding professors learned more and achieved better outcomes in the short and long term. Higher grades and dampened learning are a disservice to everyone, and UChicago seems to understand that. 

Consider this analogy from the school’s 2015 “Aims of Education,” an annual speech on the purpose of a UChicago education. Professor John Martin explained that there are troves of people who spend hours on stationary bikes, hundreds on fake tans, and do a thousand other things to achieve a certain appearance—to look like they have gone on vacation, spent time outdoors, or whatever else they want to masquerade as. The same is true of education. Schools can assign little real work, offer bogus classes, and pump grades to the ceiling, but this is not learning. Ponder the educational fake tan the next time you feel the slog of this place and wish you could just have that A handed to you. There is no such thing as a free grade.