When the University of Michigan announced that first-year students in its College of Literature, Science and the Arts would take their first semester pass/no-credit, the reactions came fast. A lot of them sounded the same: Kids have it easy these days. I got through freshman year with letter grades, so they can too. Toughen up.
I understand the instinct. But “if I could do it, they can do it” is an individual answer to a systemic question. It judges a whole generation by personal grit and ignores the conditions that shaped them.
The backlash worked. Less than two months after announcing the plan, U-M put it on pause.
And when you look at the data, those conditions have changed a lot.
What Michigan proposed
Starting in fall 2027, LSA freshman would have passed or received no credit for their first-semester courses. It’s a big group: LSA enrolled 3,521 of U-M’s 8,178 first-year students in fall 2025.
What many critics missed is that grades wouldn’t have disappeared. Professors would still assign them, and students would still get feedback all semester. The university would keep those grades internally for advising, scholarships, awards, and internship applications. They just wouldn’t appear on external transcripts or could toward GPA. Normal grading would start in the second semester.
This isn’t a new idea, either. MIT has graded first-semester students pass/no record for decades to help them adjust without worrying about their GPA. Johns Hopkins used a similar “covered grades” policy from 1971 until ending it in 2017.
The conditions these students came through
The students this pilot was meant for, those starting college in fall 2027, entered kindergarten around 204. That’s almost exactly when researches at Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth say American entered a “learning recession.” After more than two decades of steady gains, reading and math achievement stalled and started to slide around 2013. The researchers point to two likely causes: the spread of social media and a rollback of school accountability.
Then, when these students were in fifth and sixth grade, COVID hit. The pandemic didn’t start the decline, but it surely made it worse.
Michigan has felt this especially hard. In 2024, the state ranked 44th in the nation for fourth-grade reading, and it’s in the bottom five states for post-pandemic reading recovery. Only 24% of Michigan fourth graders were proficient readers, compared with 30% nationally. The students coming up behind them are inheriting the same system.
The habits around reading have changed too. Only 14% of 13-year-olds read for fun almost every day, down from 27% in 2012. Family reading before bed has been replaced, in a lot of homes, by screens.
And the schools themselves are under strain. Michigan funds districts mostly by the number of students enrolled. But the state’s 2020 birth count was about one-third lower than in 1990, so enrollment keeps falling. Losing just 25 students can cost a district around $225,000. Michigan also ranks 44th in the nation for starting teacher pay, and the state is still struggling with teacher shortages. The result is a system stretched thin.
None of this is about blame. These students didn’t “get dumber.” They grew up inside conditions that they did not choose.
What that looks like on day one
Picture a freshman who knows, deep down, that they’re behind. They feel it in their first college paper or their first calculus quiz. And they’re not alone in carrying that weight.
According to the Healthy Minds Study, which is run out of U-M, nearly one in three college students reports moderate to severe anxiety, and more than half report high levels of loneliness. Those numbers have actually improved since their 2022 peak, but they’re still high.
Anxious, underprepared students often don’t ask for help. Going to office hours or admitting you’re lost can feel like proof that you don’t belong. So they stay quiet, fall further behind, and sometimes stop out entirely.
This is where pass/no-credit makes sense. It lowers the cost of saying “I don’t get this.” It makes it safer to visit office hours, take a hard class, or try a subject you’ve never studied. It gives students one semester to learn how to be a college student before every mistake lands on a permanent record.
The strongest argument against it
To be fair, not every critic is just saying “toughen up.” The best version of the counterargument is serious.
Some experts worry the change adds to eroding academic rigor, alongside grade inflation and lighter reading loads. And if students arrive underprepared, hiding their grades could delay the moment they, or anyone else, realize it. A struggling student who passes quietly in the fall could hit a wall in the spring.
That’s a fair concern, and it isn’t hypothetical. When Johns Hopkins moved to end its covered grades policy, officials worried it delayed students who needed help from seeking it out. Students pushed back, arguing the policy mattered most for disadvantaged students who arrived without strong high school preparation.
Two things answer the concern. First, grades still exist internally, and advisors can still see who is struggling. Second, the real test isn’t the grading policy itself. It’s whether a college pairs it with tutoring, early-alert systems, and proactive advising.
Pass/no-credit without support is just a delay. Pass/no-credit with support is an on-ramp.
Michigan hit pause. What were critics protecting?
On September 28, 2026, U-M paused the pilot at the request of university leadership to allow more input and analysis. Some faculty said they had been left out of designing it. Critics argued it wouldn’t prepare students for the rest of college or the workforce. In a letter about the pause, an LSA leader worried that misconceptions could leave students unfairly portrayed as coddled or unprepared.
That workforce argument deserves a closer look. Where, exactly, do graduates face a letter grade after college?
In most professional jobs, feedback doesn’t arrive as a final grade at the end of a term. It comes in weekly check-ins, quick notes on a draft, and the occasional “this isn’t quite what we needed, can you take another pass?” Deadlines move. Launches slip. You learn by revising, not by being scored once and moved along. Companies like Adobe have replaced annual reviews with more frequent check-ins, and Gallup has found employees are 3.6 times more likely to feel motivated to do outstanding work when they get daily feedback instead of annual feedback.
There are exceptions. In fields like nursing, aviation, accounting, and engineering, standards are fixed, mistakes carry real consequences, and licensing exams are very real. But even there, competence is built through supervised practice and coaching, not a single grade.
So it’s worth asking: are we defending grades because they prepare students for work, or because they’re how most us of us were measured? A first semester built on feedback, revision, and asking for help looks a lot more like a modern workplace than a transcript does.
Why this matters beyond campus
The workforce these students are heading into is changing fast. As AI takes over more execution-level work, what’s left for people is judgement: analyzing problems, adapting, communicating, and leading.
Employers are already saying so. In the World Economic Forum’s latest Future of Jobs report, nearly 70% of employers named analytical thinking as an essential core skill, more than any other. Resilience, flexibility, and agility came second at 67%. Employers also expect 39% of workers’ core skills to change by 2030.
So how does a pass/no-credit semester connect to that? Critical thinking grows when students can take intellectual risks: wrestle with unfamiliar material, be wrong, and try again. That’s hard to do when every assignment feels like a threat to your GPA. A first semester focused on learning how to learn, instead of protecting a number, is practice for a career where the skills you need will keep changing.
A warning for higher ed
Public trust in colleges is low. In Gallup’s June 2026 survey, only 38% of Americans had strong confidence in higher education, down from 57% in 2015. Among people with little confidence, the top reasons were perceived political agendas, cost, and colleges failing to prepare students for the workforce.
Students aren’t giving up on education after high school. Overall enrollment is still growing. But they’re choosing different paths. Enrollment at vocational-focused two-year colleges rose 11.7% in spring 2025, the third straight year of growth, and undergraduate certificate enrollment is now 20% higher than in 2020.
Here’s the irony. The Americans who do trust higher ed point to its ability to build skills like critical thinking. That’s the core promise of a liberal arts education, and it’s exactly what the AI-era workforce needs. The promise is that too many colleges assume tradition alone will prove it.
Colleges can’t keep doing things the same way for the sake of pedagogy. They have to design for the students who actually show up, and prove their value to the ones still deciding whether to enroll.
Meeting students where they are
Pass/no-credit for one semester won’t fix a learning recession that has lasted more than a decade, a statewide literacy crisis, or a generation’s anxiety.
What Michigan’s proposal did signal was something important: a major university trying to design for the students in front of it, not for the students it wishes it had. That’s building a ramp to the bar, not lowering the bar.
The pause doesn’t have to be the end of that idea. It could be a chance to get it right: bring faculty to the table, pair the policy with real support, and explain it clearly enough that “coddled” stops being the headline.
So the next time you hear “back in my day,” it’s worth remembering that their day looked very different from today’s. The question isn’t whether these students can toughen up. It’s whether our institutions are willing to adapt.
