Is Academic Inflation Real, Or Does The Internet Just Make It Seem Worse? What Parents Should Know
Last Tuesday, I was folding my 13-year-old’s soccer uniforms after he went to bed, scrolling the local middle school parent group I joined for field trip reminders, when I saw a post that stopped me. A mom of a 10th grader shared a screenshot of her son’s high school resume, already packed with two AP classes, weekly volunteer shifts at the local zoo, a part-time barista job, and a summer research project at the nearby university. The comments filled up fast: “When I was 15, I just babysat and binged old shows. What changed?” “Is this academic inflation, or is it just me?”
I get the question. I’ve worked as a part-time high school tutor for eight years, and I see this panic up close every week. I’ve had juniors cry to me in library study sessions that a 3 on their AP exam is a failure, because every TikTok they see about college admissions is full of kids posting 5s and Ivy League acceptance letters. I’ve had parents ask me if their 8th grader needs to start picking extracurriculars that look good for college, because they saw a thread saying “freshman year is too late to start.”
Two weeks ago, I sat across from Lila, an 11th grader I tutor for biology, as she wiped her eyes on her hoodie after getting her AP exam score back. She got a 3, which is passing, and enough to get credit at most public universities in our state. But she’d spent the prior week scrolling a Reddit thread about college admissions that convinced her a 3 would keep her out of every nursing program she wanted to apply to. “Everyone else has 4s and 5s,” she said. “I’m already behind.” I asked her how many kids in her 300-person junior class were applying to nursing programs and had scored a 5 on AP Bio. She guessed at least 40. When we checked the course registration list together, it was seven.
That’s the thing that never gets talked about enough: academic inflation is a little bit real, but most of the constant panic we feel as parents is just the internet doing what algorithms do best – showing us the extreme outliers, over and over.
It’s true that grades have crept up over the last 30 years. More high schools offer more AP classes now than they did when I applied to college, and average GPAs are a little higher than they were a generation ago. Top 20 private universities do get ten times more applications than they did in the 1990s, thanks to the Common App making it easy to apply to a dozen schools at once, so their acceptance rates are way lower. That part isn’t made up. But that reality only applies to a tiny sliver of students applying to a tiny sliver of schools. 98% of four-year colleges in the U.S. accept more than half of their applicants, and half of all undergrads attend community college. You’d never know that from scrolling parenting groups or college TikTok, because those ordinary outcomes don’t go viral. Only the most impressive, most competitive resumes get shared and clicked.
I’ve found a few small, concrete things that cut through the noise for my own kid and the families I work with. The first is the reality check count. Whenever my son or a student brings up something “everyone is doing” that they saw online, I ask them to count how many people in their actual grade actually do it. More often than not, they guess 10 or 20 times the actual number, just like Lila did. That one quick check takes a lot of the pressure off.
The second thing I do is keep a running list of people we actually know who have steady, happy lives, and talk about their high school experiences once a semester. My list includes the elementary school teacher down the street who graduated with a 2.8 GPA and no AP classes, the HVAC technician who lives two blocks over and makes more than I do starting his own business, and my cousin who went to community college for two years before transferring to our state university and now works as a pediatric nurse. None of them had the perfect, packed resume that people post about online, and all of them are doing fine. It’s a lot easier for kids to put that in perspective than it is to argue with a 15-second TikTok.
The third thing is simple: if you have a question about college admissions or graduation requirements, go straight to the official source, not social media. Most state public universities list the average GPA and test scores of accepted students right on their admissions website, and it’s almost never the 4.0 unweighted with five APs that people talk about online. I’ve had dozens of parents tell me they were shocked how much lower the bar actually is once they look it up themselves.
Last week, my 13-year-old came home and told me one of his friends is already taking online SAT prep classes. I felt that familiar little twist of panic, like I was falling behind already. We sat down after dinner and did our count: just one kid in his whole 7th grade class is taking SAT prep. Then we talked about Mia, the 22-year-old dental hygienist who lives down the street, who got her start at community college and didn’t even take the SAT until senior year.
We still have those moments. I don’t think the whole conversation around academic inflation is wrong, and I know when my son starts applying to college in four years, there will be new stresses I can’t predict right now. But for now, the reality checks work. They keep the panic from getting bigger than it needs to be.
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