The end of the academic year typically brings a quieter news cycle as campuses turn their attention to summer planning, and this week mostly followed that pattern. The exception was loud enough to dominate every higher ed outlet I follow plus most of the popular press. Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to cap the number of A grades professors can award at 20 percent per class, beginning in fall 2027. The decision deserves a careful read, and so does the coverage it's getting, so I'm giving the whole issue to it. 

What Does a Grade Actually Signify 

From Harvard Will Cap A Grades 

Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to cap A grades at 20 percent of students per class, plus four additional A's, beginning in fall 2027.  

Our Thoughts  

Okay, so given my background, you probably expected me to write about the recently released 2026 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report | Teaching and Learning Edition. I know I expected to write about that. I was excited to write about that, but then my news feed changed my plans. When every major news outlet in my feed (CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, AP, The Guardian, and Fox News to name a few) plus every higher ed trade publication reports on it, the story about Harvard’s decision to cap A grades becomes about more than just Harvard.  

First, this is not a dig at Harvard. As someone who nerds out about higher education, how could you not respect the first institution of higher education in our country? Beyond the immense contributions their faculty have made to our understanding of the world, they were also one of the first to open access to low-income students regardless of their ability to pay. I also recognize they are in a difficult spot as they attempt to address what they see as rampant grade inflation at the institution. Never mind that Princeton tried this once, and upon determining that it didn’t work out as planned, repealed their previous decision.  

The reason I felt compelled to write about this instead is that the kind of media saturation I mentioned above will have consequences that extend well beyond Cambridge. When a state legislator in Pennsylvania or Florida or Texas reads three headlines about Harvard's grade inflation crisis over breakfast, they're not making careful distinctions between Harvard's grade distribution and the distribution at the regional public university in their district. They're forming an impression (or confirming an already held belief) that higher education has a grade inflation problem. That belief then shapes how they vote on appropriations, accountability legislation, and workforce alignment requirements. Harvard's grade distribution is not the rest of the sector's grade distribution. Most institutions don't graduate 84 percent of their students with A-range grades. Most institutions have meaningful grade variation, and many institutions have criterion-referenced rubrics and well-defended standards. But the story will be retold as a higher education story, because Harvard is the institution everyone recognizes, and that retelling will cost the rest of us credibility we cannot afford to lose right now.  

Public confidence in higher education is already at historic lows. Legislators are already looking for reasons to constrain institutional autonomy. Families are already asking whether the degree is worth the price. The Harvard story will fold into all three of those narratives, and most readers will not know that what's happening at Harvard isn't happening at their child’s regional comprehensive. This creates a communications challenge for the vast majority of institutions as there’s a fine line between communicating you have rigor without revealing grade ranges and talking about what you might be doing to combat grade inflation on your campus (if it exists) without bringing up Harvard.  

The challenge is harder because the conditions driving grade inflation at most institutions aren't the conditions Harvard is operating under. Take adjunctification. Adjunct and non-tenure-track faculty teach a significant share of undergraduate courses at most institutions, and their contracts often depend on student evaluations. When your continued employment is tied to how students rate your course, awarding more A's is the rational response. That pressure is real at regional comprehensives, community colleges, and most private institutions outside the top tier; it is not what's driving Harvard's distribution. Harvard isn't running on adjunct labor at anywhere near the same scale, which means whatever is happening with grades there has different causes than what's happening at the regional comprehensive in your neighborhood. A cap that addresses the Harvard version of the problem doesn't touch the structural pressure most institutions are actually navigating. 

There's also the AI dimension that no one in the Harvard coverage is discussing. We've spent a lot of time in this newsletter on how AI is breaking traditional assessment, including the University of Sydney's two-lane framework back in Issue 100. If students are increasingly producing coursework with AI assistance, then the grades professors assign increasingly reflect what AI can produce rather than what the student can demonstrate. A 20 percent cap doesn't change that; it simply rations the result. The students who get the A's under the new system will still be the ones whose AI-assisted work appears strongest, alongside the small number who genuinely outperformed their classmates. Harvard's faculty have built a sorting mechanism for a measurement they no longer trust. Sydney was at least asking the right question: can we redesign assessment so that we're measuring what students have actually learned? Harvard's approach takes the existing assessment regime as given and just constrains the output. That's a problem every institution is wrestling with, but the solutions look different depending on whether your faculty have the time, security, and institutional support to redesign assessment from the ground up. That's not most campuses. 

What would actually address grade inflation is the work Harvard's cap is designed to avoid. It means redesigning assignments so that the work being graded reflects what the student can do, not what AI can produce. It means rebuilding rubrics so that an A describes specific demonstrated competence rather than relative class performance. It means investing in faculty development so instructors have current, defensible approaches to assessment in an environment that's changed dramatically in three years. None of that work scales easily, and none of it generates a vote you can publicize. It happens course by course, department by department, over years. Most institutions don't have the faculty capacity, the development budgets, or the academic affairs bandwidth to take that on at scale. The campuses that are doing it are doing it slowly and quietly, with the resources they have. Harvard has the resources to do that work and chose not to. The regional comprehensive an hour down the road would do it if it could and is making real progress in pockets where it can. Neither of those stories will get written. 

So we end up in a strange position. Harvard has adopted a solution that probably won't fix what it's trying to fix, that sidesteps the AI question entirely, and that doesn't touch the structural pressures driving grade inflation at most other institutions. And the rest of us, who had nothing to do with the decision, are about to spend the next several years answering questions about it. 

For institutions that are not Harvard, this is a good moment to know your own grading data well enough to push back. When a board member, legislator, or parent brings up the Harvard story, you should be able to answer the questions they're really asking. Are A grades concentrated in certain departments, modalities, or course levels on your campus? What does the distribution look like across full-time versus contingent faculty? Is the work that earned those A's actually the student's work? Those are questions you can answer with your own data, and the answers will tell a different story than the one Harvard is telling. The people best positioned to draw that distinction are the people running the institutions. Don't wait for the coverage to do it for you.  

Sparks 

• A new law in Utah allows students to opt out of coursework that conflicts with their beliefs (The Hechinger Report) - A new law in Utah requires faculty to provide alternate assignments to students who feel that something in the class conflicts with their strongly held religious or personal beliefs. Given the current politicization of higher education, this one is worth paying attention to as it develops.
• The University That Chose to Shrink (The Chronicle of Higher Education) - The University of Arizona has intentionally worked to reduce the size of its student body to boost completion rates. This is a look at an interesting idea to intentionally improve graduation rates by helping ensure students get more individual attention with smaller classes.
• Education Department releases final rule for Workforce Pell (Higher Ed Dive) - The final rules for Workforce Pell are available and take effect on July 20. If your institution plans to use this form of financial aid, be sure to read up on how it works over the next few weeks.