David Letterman Was Barely a C Student. So He Created a Scholarship Where Grades Wouldn’t Decide Who Deserved a Chance

For generations, students have been taught to understand success through letters.

A means excellent.

B means good.

C means average.

And somewhere along the way, those letters can begin to feel like something much larger than marks on a report card. They can start to feel like judgments about intelligence, talent and even future potential.

David Letterman knew that feeling.

Long before he became one of the most recognizable figures in American television, Letterman was a student at Ball State University in Indiana. He studied radio and television, but by his own description, he was hardly an academic star.

Years later, while remembering one of the professors who had changed his life, Letterman put it plainly.

He said he had been “barely a ‘C’ student” at Ball State.

That admission is not an internet legend or an inspirational quote loosely attributed to him. Ball State University published Letterman's own statement in 2013 after the death of professor Darrell Wible, whom Letterman credited as an important mentor.

And decades after his college years, Letterman used his own experience to create something unusual at the university that helped launch his career.

He established a scholarship in which grades were deliberately removed as the primary measure of merit.

According to official Ball State scholarship rules, grades were not to be used as a criterion or condition for evaluation or consideration, beyond the requirement that applicants remain academically eligible to attend the university.

Instead, the scholarship was to be awarded primarily on one thing:

creativity.

It was a simple decision with a powerful message.

A transcript can tell you something about a student.

It cannot tell you everything.

Before the Late-Night Desk

It is difficult to separate David Letterman from the television career that made him famous.

For more than three decades, he became one of the defining figures of American late-night television, first with NBC's Late Night with David Letterman and later with CBS's Late Show with David Letterman.

His style was unconventional.

Instead of presenting polished television as something sacred, Letterman often seemed determined to take it apart.

He mixed celebrity interviews with strange comedy, absurd sketches, self-deprecation and ideas that would have looked ridiculous on paper.

That willingness to be unusual became part of his identity.

But before national television, New York studios and major entertainment awards, there was Ball State.

Letterman studied radio and television at the university and earned his degree in 1969, according to Ball State and biographical accounts of his career. While there, he began working in broadcasting through the university's radio station, experience that would become foundational to everything that followed.

After college, he worked in Indiana television and radio, including as a television weatherman.

Eventually, he moved to Los Angeles, worked as a comedy writer and performer, gained attention through appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and ultimately built the television career that made his name known across the country.

Looking at that résumé decades later, it would be easy to imagine Letterman as someone whose talent must have been obvious from the beginning.

His academic record told a different story.

“Barely a C Student”

In 2013, Ball State announced the death of longtime professor Darrell Wible.

Letterman responded with a statement explaining just how important Wible had been to him during his college years.

“I was barely a ‘C’ student at Ball State in the 1960s,” Letterman said, explaining that he felt he had little productive direction before meeting the professor.

Wible became his mentor and introduced him to broadcasting in a way Letterman said changed his life.

That recollection reveals something important about education.

Students do not always arrive fully formed.

Sometimes the student who looks unremarkable on paper has simply not yet encountered the subject, teacher or opportunity that reveals where his or her abilities actually lie.

Letterman's future strength was not necessarily the kind of strength that would produce a perfect academic transcript.

His career would eventually depend on timing, observation, improvisation, writing, performance, curiosity, risk and the ability to recognize what audiences found interesting.

Those abilities are real.

They are valuable.

But they do not always fit neatly into a GPA.

Wible apparently saw something worth developing.

And years later, Letterman appears to have remembered what it felt like to be the student whose potential was larger than his grades.

A Different Kind of Scholarship

In the 1985-86 academic year, Letterman established the Letterman Telecommunications Scholarships at Ball State.

The purpose was to provide financial assistance to students in telecommunications.

But the selection rules were unusual.

An official Ball State application states explicitly:

Grades are not to be a criterion or condition for eligibility, evaluation or consideration.

There was one academic limitation.

Students still had to maintain grades high enough to meet the minimum enrollment requirements of Ball State University and the relevant academic department.

Beyond that threshold, academic performance was not supposed to determine the winner.

Instead, the scholarship was awarded primarily on the basis of creativity.

That distinction matters.

The scholarship was not a reward for failing classes.

It did not tell students that education was unimportant.

It did something more subtle.

It separated academic eligibility from creative merit.

A student needed to remain in good standing.

But once that condition was met, an A student did not automatically outrank a C student simply because of the transcript.

The work itself had to speak.

What Counts as Creativity?

Ball State's scholarship rules gave students considerable freedom in demonstrating that creativity.

Entries could include written projects.

They could involve research.

Students could submit audio work, interactive media, computer graphics, websites or other forms of creative presentation related to communications.

Earlier Ball State descriptions of the scholarship also referenced projects such as screenplays, music videos, short films and storyboards.

That broad definition is part of what made the program distinctive.

There was no single exam where every applicant answered the same questions.

There was no requirement that creativity look exactly one way.

A student could make something.

Write something.

Research something.

Record something.

Design something.

Tell a story.

The important question was not simply:

What grade did you earn?

It was:

What can you create?

The Scholarship Was Never Literally Only for C Students

Over the years, Letterman's scholarship has frequently been described online as a scholarship “for C students.”

There is truth behind the phrase, but it needs context.

Letterman himself openly identified with being a C student, and the scholarship became associated with the idea that academically average students should still have access to major opportunities.

A 1990 Washington Post article discussing unusual scholarships reported that C-average telecommunications students at Ball State could qualify for Letterman's scholarship and quoted a scholarship expert explaining that Letterman himself had been a C student.

ABC News later described the Letterman award as targeting “average yet creative” telecommunications students and emphasized that creative ideas, rather than high grades, were central to the competition.

But Ball State's actual rules are more precise.

They do not say that students must have C grades.

They say grades should not be a selection criterion.