Why Was One College’s Change to its First

Last week, the world learned that beginning with the class that matriculates in the fall 2027 semester, transcripts for students at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts will no longer display letter grades for classes taken during the first semester. Such grades will still be assigned and recorded internally. They will also still count for the calculation of honors. However, in addition to hiding first-semester letter grades by reporting only Pass or Fail, the university also will not include such grades in calculating students’ grade point averages. The new policy has both benefits and costs. Proponents say it will ease the grade-related worries of a generation of students entering college with record levels of anxiety and other mental health challenges. They also argue that by removing the disincentive of a potentially disappointing grade, the policy will encourage students who are still exploring various academic and career paths to experiment with unfamiliar and challenging courses. Critics argue that eliminating reported first-year grades will reduce student motivation and effort, and that these effects could persist beyond the first year by leading to the formation of poor study habits. If I were a member of the relevant University of Michigan faculty, I am not sure whether I would have supported the new policy. I would want to know how well or poorly the very similar policies at M.I.T. and a handful of other colleges and universities have worked. I also might draw on my experience. I have taught at universities broadly similar to Michigan (Rutgers, Columbia, and Cornell) for the last 34 years. Although the law students I teach are older and more self-directed than undergraduates, I see similar tradeoffs to those that the University of Michigan decision makers needed to evaluate in considering the policy change. Indeed, the grade pressure on first-semester law students is even more intense than it is for new undergraduates, given the recently heightened impact of first-semester law school grades on post-graduation employment opportunities. Exactly how to weigh the costs and benefits of the new Michigan approach strikes me as a difficult question of higher education administration about which reasonable minds can differ. There are many other such questions. These include: how many Pass/Fail courses students should be permitted to take; whether to have distribution requirements, a core curriculum, or a completely elective-based system; whether to impose a mandatory or suggested curve on all, some, or no courses, and, if so, how to structure the curve; and whether, and if so, how, to allow the use of generative AI on papers and other assignments. For those of us who make our professional home in academia, such questions are vitally important. Yet curiously, the new University of Michigan grading policy was reported not only in local Michigan news and academic-focused publications like The Chronicle of Higher Education but also in national general-audience news outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and NPR. A similar phenomenon occurred earlier this year, when Harvard University adopted its own new grading policy for undergraduates, capping the number of A grades at 20 percent per class in order to combat grade inflation. What Explains the Interest in the Minutiae of Higher Education Policy? Record-high temperatures and wildfires are daily illustrating the slow-rolling catastrophe of global warming. The United States is currently fighting and apparently losing an unpopular on-again-off-again foreign war. That war and President Trump’s tariffs have kept inflation at levels that leave millions of Americans struggling to make ends meet. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence hold great promise and pose huge risks. And the current administration exhibits unprecedented levels of corruption and disrespect for the rule of law and democracy on a daily basis. What explains the judgment of news editors that, in the midst of so much consequential news, the public does or should care about college grades at a handful of universities? The short answer is the culture war. For years, conservatives have contended that American colleges and universities, especially elite private and public universities like Harvard and Michigan, respectively, coddle student “snowflakes” and indoctrinate them in left-wing radicalism. The University of Michigan’s new policy of hiding first-semester grades fits the coddling narrative perfectly. Thus, unsurprisingly, the Fox News story linked above quotes Jonathan Alpert decrying the policy as a symptom of what he derides as “therapy culture.” The article from The Wall Street Journal—in its usually reliable news section, not its notoriously right-wing editorial page—snidely notes that the Harvard cap on grades of A will not apply to grades of A-, which likely “would become the most awarded grade.” There is also a broader ideological dimension to the focus on Michigan’s new grading policy, though it is somewhat subtle. The right’s attack on higher education has reached a fever pitch during the second Trump administration, which is abusing its powers by withholding appropriated funds and otherwise penalizing colleges and universities for fostering inclusive communities for racial minorities, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ students, teaching subjects the administration deems too “woke,” and allegedly engaging in antisemitism by failing to crack down sufficiently hard on campus protesters. What has any of that to do with grading policy? Even as the Trump administration is run by anti-science crackpots and partisan hacks, the administration claims that its actions against the country’s top educational institutions aim at fostering meritocracy. For Trump and his followers, meritocracy means dispensing with any policies that promote inclusion and belonging for members of traditionally excluded groups. It also means ranking students according to their scores and grades. A policy that mutes the performance ranking of students, even for only a semester, can thus be seen as anti-meritocratic and hence a cousin of wokeness, DEI, and whatever other bogeymen the right can conjure. The new University of Michigan first-semester grade policy will likely be good for some students and not so good for others. Whatever the merits of the policy, it should not be a topic of national conversation. That it is reflects the degraded state of our politics: the president and his millions of supporters have contempt for higher education, which has long been a key driver of American ingenuity and prosperity.