Oh, it’s huge. It’s huge. I saw higher education as a student and as a professor. Two different worlds. Back then, we worked 12 hours a day. Getting through college was extraordinarily hard work. We looked at people who worked eight hours a day as loafers. The idea, the hijinks that go on in college today go on really only because students don’t have to work. You were very lucky to get a C. A C was an average grade. A grade to be proud of.
Now grade inflation and that has taken hold, and the amount of work that I can demand as a professor of students dropped through the floor. Standards have dropped through the floor. We are graduating semi-literates. The only remaining bastions of serious education are in the technical fields. Strictly technical fields. There are all sorts of courses out there that purport to be technical and they are not.
The level of preparation of students coming into college is abysmal, literary and scientific. It’s a different world. We’re educating a generation of morons.
–Angelo Codevilla, interview in The Federalist. Emphasis mine.