Ivy League Universities Still About Education? A Closer Look at Harvard and Princeton

By Tal Fortgang ‘17

What is an Ivy League university? The simplicity of the question is deceiving. Everyone knows what Harvard is. Except increasingly, no one does – not the students who attend, and certainly not the administrators who shape the institution, thereby answering that question every day.

The university’s identity – its own sense of proper functioning, reflected in its form -- is at least contested. We learned as much in a recent set of stories about absenteeism and grade inflation at Harvard. When a Harvard freshman recently told The Harvard Crimson that “what makes a Harvard student a Harvard student is their engagement in extracurriculars” and objected that new academic reforms “attack the very notion of what Harvard is,” she articulated something remarkable. Though the quote struck some readers as naive or entitled, it displays an observant eye. This freshman has spent precious few months on campus but could already articulate – perhaps since before she even matriculated or applied -- what her institution has become: a place where academics are peripheral. As recruitment officers, promotional materials, and older students were surely quick to display, even if they did not phrase it this way, extracurriculars, networking, and credential collection are the stuff of which the Harvard “experience” is made. The spires and lecture halls look the same, but the form of the university is changing. It is catching up with its function.

Harvard recently revealed that over 60 percent of grades awarded are now A’s, up 20 percentage points from a decade ago (at which point Harvard already had a reputation for handing out A’s like Costco samples). Grade inflation has serious second-order effects, of course. As the New York Times reported in October, Harvard students routinely “skip class and fail to do the reading,” and many can earn strong grades without attending at all. One junior explained the logic plainly: “If they can get good grades without attending class, they stop.” Harvard’s own internal committee found that attendance is low, students select courses based on perceived ease, and students prioritize extracurriculars over coursework. Whatever lip service is paid to the importance of traditional study, students’ revealed preferences indicate that they believe there is more value in doing just about anything else. 

Of course, this is not a Harvard problem exclusively. Yale awards more than three-quarters of grades in the A-range. Brown offers competitive grade inflation by most measures. Princeton, which famously implemented a soft grade deflation policy in 2005, abandoned the policy in 2014 after, among other things, complaints that Princeton students were at a competitive disadvantage compared to their inflated peers. Even Princeton’s current average GPA of 3.56 — significantly lower than Harvard’s 3.8 — represents substantial inflation compared to historical norms. Across these institutions, GPAs have risen by approximately 0.1 per decade since the 1980s, with no corresponding evidence that students are learning more or figuring out how to master material more efficiently.

Grade inflation may cause a lot of disorder in Ivy League life. But it is also a symptom. That is where taking seriously the freshman quoted in the Crimson comes in. Has Harvard quietly reinvented itself as something other than an educational institution? The centrality of intellectual, stimulating, but not quite traditionally academic pursuits indicates that it has. How best to understand what it is now? 

Ivy League schools admit extraordinarily talented students. The admissions processes are obscenely competitive, with acceptance rates below 5 percent at most of these institutions. Getting in is the hard part, and those who make it through are assuredly capable and credentialed. Usually, they have distinguished themselves from their peers by building resumes emphasizing innovation and initiative. They have not just excelled in school; they have also built robots and nonprofits. That is the first signal of what elite education in the 21st century is all about. It’s a credential ratchet: You need a PhD to become a law professor, a BA to become an administrative assistant, and a CV to get into school. Having overproduced future elites of the laptop class, we need ever-innovative sorting mechanisms.

This dynamic has been accelerated by the story elite universities tell about their pride of place within the tech, startup, and innovation economy. It’s hard to display your continued leadership by touting how refined graduates of your political science department are, how well they read Plato or how good they are at considering new arguments. Perhaps you could point to graduates that have gone on to careers in the public eye; but that would be alienating in an era of political polarization and generally seems likely to entangle universities in debates about whether some conventionally rich CEO, Member of Congress, or Supreme Court Justice is “good.” 

It’s only natural that schools will look for proof of success that is less thorny, yet still indicative of well-directed brainpower. Innovation. Tech leadership. Start-ups. Yet the culture of Silicon Valley sheds the trappings of traditional success, trading suits for sweatshirts and favoring moving fast and breaking things rather than slowing down to appreciate them. That may be good for Americans and vastly improve modern quality of life. But it does not jell well with the idea that smart people should show up to lectures and read every assigned page of Machiavelli. 
Harvard’s most celebrated “alumni” are often dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. For admissions offices, this creates a remarkably convenient narrative. The easiest thing to do is brag about how brilliant your students are: they invent companies, launch startups, create the next social media platform, all on the side while technically enrolled – even earning (wouldn’t you know it!) straight A’s. 

Eventually this extracurricular brilliance, the work that earns acclaim and changes the world, begins to displace the educational component entirely. Why should students prioritize problem sets and seminar readings when the institution itself celebrates those who skipped them to build Facebook in their dorm room?

There is nothing inherent in university education serving as an obvious value-add in this equation. If students can skip class, avoid readings, and still become Harvard’s poster children, the institution is not developing them. It is, more precisely, incubating them. One could argue that the education students receive comes primarily from each other rather than from the institution itself.

Some students understand this intuitively. They’re not enjoying the results. One Harvard student told The Crimson she spent an “entire day… sobbing in bed” because the grade inflation report seemed to downplay her hard work. She shouldn’t blame the messenger, as she surely knows. She was promised intellectual formation and instead found a system that makes no genuine academic demands, meaning she could have spent her time on things she enjoyed more with the same result. If you wanted to do college “right” in an old-fashioned sense, by marinating in great texts and structured discussions of important ideas, you would be severely disappointed.  Another expressed related anguish at the thought of harsher grading standards: “I killed myself all throughout high school to try and get into this school. I was looking forward to being fulfilled by my studies now, rather than being killed by them.” The hard part was supposed to be over; getting into Harvard was meant to be a fun reward for frittering away your high school years on resume-building. 

“I can’t reach my maximum level of enjoyment just learning the material because I’m so anxious about the midterm,” said another freshman. If grades are deflated, “it’s unrealistic to assume that people will enjoy their classes.” Can you blame her for thinking “enjoyment” was the centerpiece of the Harvard experience?

Let’s not ignore the vicious-cycle relationship this has with college protest culture, either. Enjoyment comes from expression, from alignment with a seemingly righteous cause, from spending time using one’s power for good. When students encamp on quads, take over buildings, or shout down speakers, onlookers often ask whether they have better things they could be doing with their time. The answer is not so complex – it’s just ‘no,’ because increasingly daring protests are part of the college experience. You won’t be expelled for covering your face and wreaking havoc; your grades won’t even suffer. It will just be transgressive, social, downright fun. It’s the consummate Ivy League experience. 

So, what is an Ivy League education? It is a bundle of goods and services, only some of which are actually educational. The grade inflation crisis reveals that the educational component has atrophied while the credentialing, networking, and signaling components have grown. Universities have every incentive to be incubators, rather than educators. Incubating talent is its function. Absenteeism, grade inflation, protest culture, and the centrality of “enjoyment” are the forms that support it. 

Every incentive, that is, except one. Americans have built an enormous edifice of tax policy, cultural prestige, and opportunity allocation on the assumption that elite universities are primarily educational institutions performing an educational mission. They were, we assumed, providing some value-add through education, rather than simply providing beautiful buildings and expensive sustenance for four years. That assumption needs revision. 
We can preserve what these institutions currently do well — convincing talented young people to attend and encouraging them to collaborate with equally bright peers  — while reminding them that genuine academic rigor is a precondition of maintaining the special status that comes with claiming to add more than a scrap of paper to young Americans’ development. The students crying in their rooms have already figured this out, even if they aren’t quite sure why they feel so cheated. 

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.