Things you should know about the university you’re sending your kid to, but don’t. A long, but brutal critique of modern academia:

…what remedy is there for the problems of declining student competence and increasing student illiteracy? Ability and literacy are the true deliverables of a university education, aren’t they? How is their disappearance to be managed?

The first remedy is simply to juke the stats. Over the past 14 years of teaching, my students’ grade point averages have steadily gone up while real student achievement has dropped precipitously. Papers I would have failed 10 years ago as unintelligible and failing to qualify as “university-level work” I now routinely assign grades of C or higher. Each time I do so I rub another little corner of my conscience off, cheat your daughter of an honest low grade or failure that might have been the womb of a real success, and add a little bit more unreality to an already unreal situation.

I am speaking, of course, of grade inflation. For faculty, the reasons for it range from a desire to avoid time-consuming student appeals to attempting to create a level playing field for their own students in comparison to others to securing work through high subscription rates rather than real popularity to cynical acceptance of the rule of the game. Since most degrees involve no real content, it doesn’t matter how they are assessed. Beyond questions of mere style, there are no grounds for assigning one ostensibly studious paper an A and another a B when both are illusory. So let the bottom rise to whatever height is necessary in your particular market, so long as there remains at least some type of performance arc that will maintain the appearance of merit.

For students, the motives for grade inflation are similar to those of their professors in some respects and different in others. Given the way the university game is currently played, they too desire a level playing field and understand the importance of appearing to be, if not actually being, competent in their chosen field. But as practices change so do habits of mind and expectations. As students are awarded ever-higher grades, over time they will begin to believe that they deserve such grades. If this practice begins early enough, say in middle or secondary school, it will become so entrenched that, by the time they reach university, any violation of it will be taken as a grievous and unwarranted denigration of their abilities. Perhaps somewhere deep down they know, as do we, that their degrees are worthless and their accomplishments illusory. But anyone who challenges them will very likely be hauled before an appeal board and asked to explain how she has the temerity to tell them their papers are hastily compiled and undigested piles of drivel unacceptable as university-level work. The customer is always right. As one vice president I know of states on her website, she promises to provide “one-stop shops” and “exceptional customer service” to all. Do not let the stupidity of this statement fool you into believing it is in any way benign. The sad truth of the matter is that it more accurately describes the manner in which modern universities operate than the version I am arguing for here. We no longer have “students” — only “customers.”

None of what I am describing here is ever said in so many words. It doesn’t need to be, because in this regard the university operates much like a reality television show in which overt scripting is unnecessary, because everyone — the participants (students) as much as the directors (professors and administrators) — knows the script by heart: be outrageous, stupid, vulgar, and then cloyingly sentimental to bring the whole story to a satisfactory conclusion. The university’s narrative is not quite so lowbrow but it is just as scripted and just as empty: fill your classrooms with the rhetoric of experiential learning, e-learning, student-centered learning, lifelong learning, digital literacies and so on, and then top it all off with superlative grades to confirm the truth of the rhetoric, QED. Thus you may dispense with real learning and real intelligence, just as reality television has dispensed with reality.

We really need to end the student loan program. Or at least reform it.