Colleges and Universities

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🎓 Harvard's grade reckoning

Data: Harvard. Chart: Noah Bressner/Axios Harvard's faculty begins voting today on limiting the number of A's professors can award, Axios Boston's Mike Deehan writes. Why it matters: The steady rise of A's and B's at elite universities since the early 2000s has eroded GPAs as a screening tool for employers and graduate schools. 📈 Stunning stat: In 2010, A's accounted for one-third of all marks, according to an internal Harvard report. By 2025, that number doubled to over 60%. More on Harvard's proposal ...

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🤖 ChatGPT powers grade inflation

Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios

AI is exacerbating the trend of colleges handing out too many A's, Axios' Josephine Walker reports. Why it matters: Universities and colleges were already concerned about grade inflation. But now they must worry that graduates are leaving AI-proficient rather than knowledgeable about their subjects of study. ✔️ The big picture: It isn't a case where A- students get bumped to an A, says Igor Chirikov, a UC Berkeley professor who authored a study on AI and grade inflation. "We have a C student who is now an A student," Chirikov tells Axios, citing his analysis of grades given between 2018 and 2025 at an unnamed Texas research university. 📈 What they found: Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, "excellent" grades rose by 30% in classes where AI is useful, such as English composition and coding. In classes where it's not — like sculpture and lab-based courses — grades remained flat. Classes where homework was heavily weighted saw a higher rate of grade inflation, suggesting students got an AI-assisted boost. 📓 What to watch: Professors are getting crafty with steps like requiring handwritten or oral exams.

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📚 Six-figure tuitions

Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios

There's a growing six-figure club of colleges charging $100,000 or more for a single year of tuition. At least 16 schools, including Duke, Georgetown, UChicago, NYU, USC and Amherst, have crossed that benchmark, New York Magazine reports ($). What to watch: 85 colleges were already charging more than $90,000 last year so look for more entrants into the six-figure club in the next few years.

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Yale's happiness guru

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Stock: Getty Images

If happiness science had a celebrity, it'd be Yale Professor Laurie Santos, Axios' Natalie Daher writes. 📚 Santos' class on well-being was Yale's most popular in 300 years when she introduced it in 2018. She's since launched her own podcast and appeared in dozens of interviews, proving demand for her work extends far beyond the classroom. 🔭 The big picture: Santos' core belief is that you can't optimize your way to happiness — but there are steps you can take to see your emotions and your life in new ways. She notes that Americans are uniquely compelled to find silver linings, even in grief, in ways other cultures simply aren't. For Santos, happiness has two parts: how you feel and how you think your life is going. Chasing "good vibes only" won't get you there. "Happiness isn't about getting rid of your negative emotions. That's toxic positivity," she told The New York Times' Lulu Garcia-Navarro in a recent appearance on "The Interview" podcast. Instead, "you have a sense of meaning. You have a sense of purpose. It feels good to be you because of how you think it's going." Zoom in: For students glued to screens instead of talking to each other, Santos has a reframe: Negative emotions are signals, not failures. Loneliness means: Seek connection. Overwhelm means: You've taken on too much. 📱 Between the lines: Santos argues technology, including AI, will make isolation worse. The desire to connect with a real person — over a flattering, always-available chatbot — will only get harder to sustain. As she puts it, technological advancement has always made us less social: "We go to the ATM now — we don't have to talk to a teller. We don't go to a record store and talk with people about records to get our music — we just have an algorithm deliver it to us." 💡 More takeaways from Santos' research: Social connection is the clearest driver of happiness. When small talk presents itself, take it. Time famine is real, but it's also a perception problem. We have more free time than humans did even 20 years ago, but it's fragmented into "time confetti" that we fill with scrolling instead of connection. Solo time isn't automatically bad. Contemplation and solitude can have real value. The problem is the self-judgment that creeps in when we think we should be connecting instead. 💭 Natalie's thought bubble: I interviewed Santos back in 2019 — which feels like ancient history after living through the pandemic. Her advice is even more essential now. 🎧 Watch Santos on "The Interview" ... Listen to her podcast "The Happiness Lab."