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Maybe not at your school, but Harvard (hardly a no-name example) currently awards something like 85% of its grades as 'A's. It's gotten bad enough that the faculty plan on capping the number of 'A' grades handed out starting next year, which has spilled a nontrivial amount of ink in arguments back and forth. Yale is also considering similar actions.
I don't think it's quite universal (it seems more an issue at top-tier schools), but it is often acknowledged as a problem.
I think that's silly. Universities should teach material, not create rat races. If too many of your students pass the material, teach harder material.
Well, yes, and capping the number of As seems to be the means by which one incentivizes the professors to do so. I went to a semi-elite college in the mid-00s, and grade inflation in elite colleges (we considered our college elite, even though it really was only semi-, because of course we wanted to think we were peers to the Ivies) was an actively talked-about problem back then, as something like 40%+ of all grades were As. As best as I can tell, school administrations have tried to address the problem by telling professors really really hard over the last 20 years, and it has resulted in things only getting worse. So telling professors to make their material harder such that grade inflation doesn't happen doesn't seem to have any real impact; it appears that they need actual incentives.
Now, who's to say if a professor, especially a tenured one, will face any consequences if they make their material so easy as to give out more As than the cap allows? Talk is cheap, after all. But if properly enforced, it seems significantly more likely to cause professors to teach harder material than just telling them really really hard to make their material harder.
Perhaps a cap-and-trade system like with pollutants might be better still? Not sure exactly how it would work, but a humanities professor might want to "buy" the right to give out more As from a STEM professor. Not sure what the currency would be, though, to create the right incentives.
A friend of mine was working as a graduate TA of a freshman physics class a couple years ago at a prestige university, and they had a fairly reasonable initial grade distribution. School administrators yelled at the professor and told him he had to give more As.
Professors generally respect intellectual effort and accomplishment and want grades to reflect that. But when admins, students, parents (sigh) are all on the opposite side pushing for inflation, the easiest path is to lower standards.
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