@DeepBlue86 “Plenty of other places have grade inflation, by the way - I think it’s symptomatic of a larger problem in which students and their parents are treated like customers (possibly to justify the $70k/yr cost of attendance at a place like Harvard - although Princeton seems to be an honorable exception).”
Exactly what’s going on, Deresiewicz in his “Excellent Sheep” book notes that professors and students have entered a mutual non aggression pact. From the book, “Students want to do as little as possible. Profs are rewarded for research, especially at elite schools, so they want to spend as little time as possible on their classes. To the extent teaching matters at all in professional advancement, assessments are based on student evaluations, which notoriously correlate with grades…The answer all around is higher arks for shoddier works.” And he brings up the point as you note about students being customers which implies that college is a business and things like ROI have taken precedence.