More Students Are Graduating College, But Does That Just Mean It's Too Easy?

College graduation rates have gone up in recent decades, meaning fewer students are dropping out before earning their degree. Sounds like great news, right? But some researchers are taking a bit of a glass-half-empty approach and attributing this spike not to the students’ or schools’ efforts, but to an overall decline in the academic rigor of college education.

In other words, they’re wondering, as the headline of a recent Atlantic article investigating the claim ponders, if college has simply gotten too easy. According to the article, it isn’t just baseless cynicism raising this question. Jeff Denning, an economist at Brigham Young University, points to a general lack of explanation for the recent uptick in college grads. In fact, according to Denning, most factors tend to suggest the opposite would be happening. An increased enrollment of more historically underrepresented groups of students (who, according to the Atlantic, typically have lower graduation rates), a decrease in study time among college students and no decrease in student-to-faculty ratios all seem to suggest graduation rates would be on the decline. But instead, grad rates and GPAs continue to rise.

The explanation Denning came up with? The “standards for degree receipt” may have changed. AKA, college might be easier now.

However, as Harvard sociologist Christina Ciocca Eller pointed out, this doesn’t necessarily mean students are being presented with easier material. They may just be getting graded more easily (or, some might argue, more fairly).

Denning also posited that the increase may actually come back to the fact that colleges are just better at helping students now, especially given the fact that many schools are being held to a higher standard when it comes to graduation rates.

Either way, whether more students are graduating because colleges are inflating grades, putting in more effort to help students, or the whole thing has simply gotten easier, Denning admitted that it’s not necessarily “a bad thing” that more students are succeeding. After all, isn’t that kind of the point?

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