I reckon grades inflation is going to keep following tuition inflation. Can't blame Harvard for this one, most schools have to balance the financial impact that academic exigence has on families. Going to study in Boston requires enormous effort - time-wise and financially.
Given the amount of sacrifice required to get there in the first place (in my case, I got half-tuition scholarship to a Boston school after a three-year prep, my parents sold their appartment to help me pay, I took a loan on top of that and still ran out of money mid-undergrad), tough-grading and failing assignments can definitely put a lower-income student at risk of failing to graduate.
If professors start playing tough-graders and put a student a risk, the school will appear as extorting money tuition while failing to keep its promise of providing an education and a future to the kid.
I definitely had some heated discussions with older generation liberal arts professors who couldn't understand why it wasn't OK to "F" me for some stupid petty deadline. They couldn't fathom that from a student's perspective, the money at stake increases over the duration of the degree, in turn growing the potential cost of academic failure (or under-performance).
Harvard is also subject to the problem, it just seems to deal with it in its usual magazine-cover-first-in-class-student way.
Given the amount of sacrifice required to get there in the first place (in my case, I got half-tuition scholarship to a Boston school after a three-year prep, my parents sold their appartment to help me pay, I took a loan on top of that and still ran out of money mid-undergrad), tough-grading and failing assignments can definitely put a lower-income student at risk of failing to graduate. If professors start playing tough-graders and put a student a risk, the school will appear as extorting money tuition while failing to keep its promise of providing an education and a future to the kid. I definitely had some heated discussions with older generation liberal arts professors who couldn't understand why it wasn't OK to "F" me for some stupid petty deadline. They couldn't fathom that from a student's perspective, the money at stake increases over the duration of the degree, in turn growing the potential cost of academic failure (or under-performance). Harvard is also subject to the problem, it just seems to deal with it in its usual magazine-cover-first-in-class-student way.