Higher education lied to my generation, and Michigan is hiding grades to keep sorting students.
Starting in fall 2027, first-semester freshmen in the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts — about half of Michigan’s roughly 8,000 first-years — will see “pass or no credit” on their transcripts instead of a letter grade. Their GPAs will not move. The university says the change responds to “the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals” and will let “intrinsic motivations” guide “personally meaningful academic journeys.” It has not said how it reached that decision.
Read the whole announcement. Professors will still assign grades internally “to track eligibility for scholarships and academic awards.” The grade did not disappear. It moved from the transcript — the document students are supposed to be able to read — into the file that gates their aid.
The university is saying two things at once: the letter is too cruel for the record, and the letter is too necessary to give up. Michigan will de-stress one semester while keeping the sorting that the stress was always for.
Consider who that arrangement serves. The student who can walk away from a merit package and the student whose place depends on financial aid are not the same student. For the student whose parents write the tuition check, a hidden first-semester grade is nearly weightless. At worst, it is one difficult semester to rebuild from. For the student whose scholarship depends on academic performance, the internal grade still decides whether the money keeps paying. Now she will not see it.
I write from the comfortable end of that distinction: two incomes, two children too young for Michigan, college-educated parents who helped me navigate financial-aid paperwork, and a down payment helped by my husband’s grandmother’s estate. I am not that student. The announcement is addressed to her all the same. Michigan has arranged for the students who can least afford to be sorted to be the ones it keeps sorting, only silently. The relief falls where the stress was survivable. The pressure stays where one bad semester could cost a kid her seat, and she loses the one right she had: to know it was coming.
Concede what is true. The students are not imagining the pressure. Derek Peterson, the former faculty-government chair, is right that they carry more stress than their predecessors: social-media noise, bleaker job prospects and less secure economic conditions. A first semester is genuinely hard. The anxiety is real.
But the honest answer to a structural crisis is not to hide the scoreboard.
The scoreboard was already broken. MLive’s review found that 74.1 percent of Michigan’s undergraduate grades in 2022 were an A-plus, A or A-minus, up from 57.6 percent a decade earlier. When nearly three-quarters of grades are A-range, an A is no longer a signal of distinction. It is a ribbon with a hidden roster of losers.
Harvard has moved in the opposite direction, voting to cap A grades at 20 percent of a course; its committee predicted that the A-minus would become the most awarded grade. MIT and Caltech have run similar grade-covering programs for years. Colleges have been dropping supplemental essays because artificial intelligence can counterfeit the admissions signal. Michigan comes at the same collapse from another direction: not by repairing the signal, but by making its failure unreadable.
The failure begins long before anyone reaches Ann Arbor. UC San Diego reports that the share of freshmen placed into classes to redo elementary- and middle-school math before attempting precalculus reached 8.5 percent last year, up from 0.5 percent in 2020. Eighteen-year-olds are paying college tuition to redo elementary math. Michigan’s answer to a pipeline that stopped teaching is “pass or no credit,” laid over what happened.
That is not mercy. It is administrative anesthesia.
A grade used to be the one honest item in the whole transaction: a public number, yours, that told you where you stood and let you correct course the next semester. My father believed in that ledger. He spent 38 years as a USPS supervisor. At St. Stanislaus in Lansdale, the parish-school bargain was discipline, respectability and college placement: do the work, earn the marks, get the life. He sent three children through Catholic school on a single postal wage because he trusted the ledger.
I sat at my kitchen table at eleven at night with a spreadsheet open and thought about him. The ledger was the lie. My father was not the one who held it. He believed in it, which is a different and much smaller thing.
My generation was trained to understand itself as a walking college résumé, as Anne Helen Petersen wrote. We were taught to read the number as our worth while the institutions issuing the numbers diluted them into noise. You do not cure that by hiding the number. You cure it by stopping the sorting that made the number carry a person’s entire future.
Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” is the sound of that failure turned inward: the structural malfunction experienced as a defect in the self, the depression working the graveyard shift, the suspicion that the problem lives inside you. The students are not fragile. They are accurate. Their anxiety is perception doing its job. The machine was advertised as a meritocracy, and its own institutions are now admitting that the instruments were never stable enough to measure what they promised.
This is theater with a scholarship line item instead of reform. The student whose parents can decode the system gets a relaxed first semester with the safety net still in place. The student who needs the money gets no meaningful relief, because the internal grade still decides everything. They are de-stressing the students who can afford to be de-stressed and preserving the sorting for the students who need it most.
The real fix is not mysterious. Publish a scholarship matrix so students can see where they stand. Fund classes and advisers so students learn instead of merely being sorted. Build a pipeline that does not send freshmen back to elementary math. Make public college affordable enough that a first semester can be a real experiment instead of a decade-long financial bet. Give grades their actual job back: telling the truth early enough for a student to act on it.
My daughter is four. By the time she is 19, I hope universities have finished confessing the whole ladder — not one rung at a time, not one semester at a time, but the thing itself. In “The Manuscript,” Swift reads back an older generation’s story and finds that its meaning changes because the reader has changed. That is what Michigan has done for my cohort in reverse: it has finally read the confession out loud.
“Being on your own” is the care-infrastructure mission statement of this decade. The freshman who reads “pass” while the number deciding whether she can return in January sits in a file she will never open is, finally, entirely on her own.