Here, in higher education, or what passes for higher education. There were two letters in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section with excuses for American pupils in higher education, or even just getting into a higher education institution.

One lamented, using rowing as his example, the dearth of foreign students on his college’s rowing teams compared with today’s dearth of American students on those same teams. The rollover, he wrote, was due colleges actively recruiting winning athletes world wide and how that global recruitment squeezed out those American wannabe athletes, which in turn deprived those American wannabes their college educations. Even with his excuses, he’s on the right track with his concluding questions:

Is it not US universities’ main charter to educate productive citizens? What’s the purpose of collegiate sports in America?

Then there’s the other letter-writer.

When colleges take applications from other countries, the talent pool becomes the world. This affects American teenagers, who are squeezed out of the competition. Top scores and grades from US high schools are no longer an entry point into the most competitive schools in the same way top forehands and serves are no longer an entry point onto the tennis team … It gives us a chance to reflect on what we owe young Americans versus the importance of going for the absolute “best product” on the court or in the classroom.

This one hinted at the source of the problem, but it’s unclear to me that he understood his hinting. Top scores and grades from US high schools are no longer an entry point…. There are two areas of responsibility here. One is with the teachers unions dominating public high schools. Those unions are more interested union perks than they are in doing something about the well-documented years of decline and collapse of their student products as demonstrated by those students’ test scores. These are students who have no business even applying to any college or university: their union teachers have left them totally unprepared for a rigorous college/university education, or even for life in the real world earning their own way in any sort of job.

The other is with those students themselves, and their status consciousness and notorious lack of work ethic. Work hard and get ahead is the American middle class mantra, and it’s a Truth. What’s lacking in too many of today’s high school student population, though, is any understanding of that “work hard” part.

For example, our farmers are complaining about a lack of farm workers to help them get their crops planted and then harvested. Ranchers have spoken of the same lack in handling their cattle ranches, feed lots, and dairy facilities. How many of today’s teenagers spend their summers detasseling corn, picking lettuce, mounting up and herding cattle, shoveling feed or operating the feeders on those feed lots, milking dairy cows or operating the milking machines? And, by the way, earning some college money along the way.

The competition in life for American children has gone global. So what. Those children need to work hard so they can compete globally. And one more thing: today’s parents need to lose their self-focus and work with their children, helping them, encouraging them to work hard enough during the school year and during the summer to be able to compete globally.

Complaining about competition gone global is a loser’s game.

Or it shouldn’t be. Harvard may be moving to control grade inflation for its students—everyone gets an A—by capping the number of A’s a professor can hand out in his classes.

The whining and bellyaching from the students are loud and hysterical—”crude and absurd” they caterwaul. That shouldn’t matter to school management, though; the kiddies are there to learn in what should be a challenging environment, not to get stars on their calendars and Blue Ribbons for showing up.

A frenzied debate has gripped campus, with students protesting that the changes would increase stress, fuel competition, and discourage academic exploration.

Bunch of crybabies. Stress, as much as happiness and ease, are a part of life and is much more productive than celebrating unearned plaudits and partying. It’s cowardly of them to fear competition; aside from strengthening them for life in the world, competition is how progress is made—good ideas, mechanisms, techniques, et al., survive, even flourish, while bad ideas fall by the wayside. Without competition, the latter simply clutter to the point of pollution everything else. Finally, only the timid would be discouraged from exploration, and the stress and competition would only strengthen the timid, or move them out of the school altogether. Those pupils don’t belong in school, anyway; they’re only wasting their parents’ money and whatever school financial aid they’ve been getting.

“The fact that this policy even MIGHT go into effect with 94% student disapproval is absurd and goes to show how much this administration cares about us,” said one commenter on a Harvard discussion forum.

Crybabies, indeed. The school’s caring would be coming—if management has the backbone to proceed—in the form of badly needed tough love.

If the students put as much energy into their studies as they are in protesting having to work at those studies, they’d be doing better and be stronger graduates for that.

There’s another aspect to this, though:

Harvard’s faculty is set to vote next week on a proposal to cap the number of A’s per course, which now comprise more than half of undergraduate grades after years of inflation. The plan also suggests getting rid of GPA as an internal metric, instead using percentile rank to calculate honors like cum laude recognition.

It shouldn’t be up to the faculty, either. Their input would be useful on something like this, but they work, at least nominally, for the school management team, not the other way around, and this sort of thing more properly belongs as a management decision.

In the end, three things need to happen. The first is to implement the system without hesitation while recognizing, and acting on the recognition, that this is only a first step (capping A’s but not A-‘s is just silly). Second is to recognize that the decision is management’s not faculty’s and proceed with or without faculty “approval.” Third is handling the pupils and faculty members who can’t handle this academic culture change: expel the students who don’t adapt, and send the faculty members who don’t adapt (including by slow-walking implementation or finding ways to weasel-word around the change) on their way to another enterprise’s payroll.