Reports from Harvard and Yale reveal that about 80% of students at both institutions receive As, with mean GPAs reaching 3.7 at Yale and 3.8 at Harvard.
This is a trend that has stretched across decades and across higher education in general. While there was a large jump in the proportion of A grades in 2020, grade inflation has been occurring for a long time. In the 1960s, average GPAs were around 2.5 and most students earned Cs. The incentives of the military draft for the Vietnam War led to dramatic increases in GPA in the 1970s, but the trend has continued since then.
Figure 1: Average GPA in U.S. four-year schools
Source: Rojstaczer and Healy (2010), “Grading in American Colleges and Universities,” Teachers College Record, figure 1.
While the above data ends in 2010, The Yale Daily News article contains a chart of the proportion of letter grades at Yale since then.
Figure 2: Letter grade distribution at Yale, 2010-2023
Source: Ray Fair, “Grade Report Update: 2022-2023,” table 1. Retrieved from Gorelick, “Faculty report reveals average Yale College GPA, grade distributions by subject,” Yale Daily News, November 30, 2023.
Grade inflation makes it difficult for employers to hire based on academic performance. Students are learning this and so are using other methods to stand out among job market competitors. Straight As at institutions like Harvard and Yale aren’t enough to signal productivity to prospective employers.
However, there are big disparities across fields. The Yale report shows that subjects like “Women’s Gender & Sexuality Studies” (92.06 percent As) and “Ethnicity, Race, & Migration” (85.43 percent As) are giving top grades to a much greater extent than subjects like economics (52.39 percent) and math (55.18 percent As).
Read the Yale Daily News article here and the Harvard Crimson article here.
