@Creekland : I’ve been posting about these issues for many years. I believe after some point, USNWR rankings and prestige just are not measuring academic quality that well and perceptions of quality have been conflated with things like selectivity (only natural…however, once a school is already fairly selective, let us say median SAT of 1300, I always thought: “What really makes folks think that instructors are going to change their methods of teaching and culture of teaching simply because the high achievers became even more high achieving”. That has never been an incentive for reform. There are too many elements causing inertia including the increased desire of students for cushy living situations, dining, an ultra vibrant social life/party scene, yet the ability to maintain very high grades in addition to the increase value of “bread-making” research by faculty. I do believe that the so called two way contract of non-aggression spoken about in higher ed lit is a very real thing that even occurs at elites, some more than others. Students and their parents, at these costs, are customers after all).
Also, if you read anything, note that schools have a different type of rigor. Oddly there are many “whiner” schools where there are tons of complaints about grade deflation and “being hard”, but when I go investigate, it doesn’t compare well to what I regard as rigor, at least “relevant/good” rigor. I find that many students are just complaining about having too much volume of content (versus an HS course) and having to regurgitate it. This definitely goes for something like biology where lots of instructors still employ that sort of “bad” rigor. I found that this pattern was more rampant in some departments(and their associated “elite” school) than others. And then I started looking into funding for STEM curricula investments and renovations and was not surprised that they were a) not there to be seen or hadn’t been listed for a grant in forever (HHMI is one of the big organizations funding such efforts). Whole life sciences (and even chemistry) departments can away with non-sense so as long as they have marketed a school well and have convinced students that the level of their education is similar to other similar caliber or better schools. The students are in a bubble so don’t have other reference points. From what I’ve seen on these forums and just in general, it looks like super highly ranked schools (most in the top 10) have more “conscious” students who may indeed contact a friend at another Ivy/elite school and inquire about and even compare course materials.
Some schools don’t have that culture and can only compare a course to internal reference points, which if fortunate may set a decent bar. However, for some weaker departments in UG education at a school, it may be a much lower bar than the student realizes. All the student sees is: “I am having a harder time making an A than in HS” and it may have nothing to do with cognitive complexity of the material or assignments. Outside of schools overloaded with pre-professionals, many “whiner” schools without the type of course rigor to match appear to have bigger party cultures and more distracting social elements that may perhaps make everything “feel” harder than it actually is. The threshold for “pain” is less at such schools and perhaps instructors at such schools in certain departments may recognize this. Many instructors basically just give in and say: “Okay, I will just give you this type of rigor because it will still yield the desired grade distribution and people will complain that it seems hard but not unfair” (unfair in this case = instructor requests far more than regurgitation, low level applications/applied memorization, basic understanding of ONLY material that was explicitly presented. The bar for “unfair” is set low at some places).
I get the feeling that teaching cultures and the type of rigor dominant in some departments and schools does somewhat reflect campus life and student culture as well in addition to the orientation of the departments’ faculty and administrators. You can tell which cultures have not really changed but so much with increased selectivity, because not many older teachers are changing their methods to challenge the higher IQ students (and these higher IQ students still react very adversely to being challenged differently than in the past), and junior faculty that are much younger are by and large refusing to make changes based upon the positive trends in education (and education research). And perhaps they are right to be cautious. I have looked at some course websites where the instructor gave the same caliber assignments and exams in 2015 as they did in like 2008 or before and there were only mild or no increases in exam averages. In addition, if the instructor wanted to write one lower average exam, it didn’t take much of a change in the level or distribution of problem types to drive an average down by 10 or more points. If I saw that as an instructor, and was say…a biology teacher that traditionally “challenges” students through content/regurgitation overload, and was on the fence about integrating more problem solving elements and experimental interpretation/data analysis, I would probably have to pass on changing if I am a research faculty.