In Garrison Keillor’s fictional town, all the children are above average. In actual American high schools, they are now mostly A students: the share of seniors reporting an A average has more than doubled since 1976, while truancy hasn’t budged and teenagers’ opinion of their own intelligence sits exactly where it sat under President Ford. The grades moved. Nothing else did.
Monitoring the Future asks seniors their overall grade average on a nine-point scale. In 1976 the report card looked like a bell: 19% A’s, 55% B’s, 26% C or below. The bell has been melting leftward ever since — slowly through the 1980s, then steadily, with no pause for the accountability era, the Common Core, or the pandemic. The class of 2024 reports 49% A’s, 39% B’s, and 12% C or below. At the current pace, the median American senior will be an A student before the decade ends — a curve where the top half of the scale holds nearly everyone.
Could the kids just be better? The survey carries its own control variables, and both are flat lines. Ask seniors to rate their intelligence against their peers: 55.3% said above-average in 1976, 57.0% say so now — the Lake Wobegon illusion itself, unchanged across half a century. Ask how often they cut school in the past month: 31% in 1976, 28% in 2024. Meanwhile national test scores (NAEP’s long-term trend) moved a few points over the same period, then fell after 2019 while A’s kept climbing. Effort constant, self-image constant, measured skill roughly constant — grades up 30 points. That is not achievement. That is the currency being reprinted.
Cross the two questions and the inflation becomes concrete. Among students who call themselves above average in intelligence, A-rates rose from 30% (1976–79) to 61% (2020–24). Among self-described average students: from 5.6% to 34.5% — meaning today’s self-proclaimed average student earns A’s more often than the 1970s honor-roll candidate did. Even students who rate themselves below average now clear an A one time in five. The A has been democratized; whatever it once signaled, it now signals mostly attendance.
Grade inflation had a companion: ambition inflation. Seniors planning to attend a four-year college jumped from 51% in 1976 to a peak of 84% around 2010 — and has since slid back to 73%, the first sustained retreat in the study’s history, tracking a decade of rising tuition and falling faith in the degree. Both booms are now sharply female: girls out-grade boys by 15 points (56% vs 42% A averages) and out-plan them by 16 (82% vs 66% expecting a 4-year degree). If the A is the currency of school and college its bank, boys are increasingly opting out of the economy altogether.
A generous reading exists: grading philosophies changed on purpose, from sorting students to encouraging them, and the old C-heavy curve was its own kind of arbitrary. But signals only work while they discriminate. When half the class holds the top grade, colleges reach for test scores (now returning), employers reach for other proxies, and the students who most needed the grade to vouch for them — the talented kids from unconnected families — lose the one currency that was supposed to be theirs.