The University of Michigan’s liberal arts program apparently stresses so many new students out that they are going to have all of their first semester courses as pass or no credit.
“Our goal is to help first-year students acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys — core elements of a liberal arts and sciences education.”
The university said the program is designed to “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals.” It will not include an opt-out provision.
So these students will have an entire semester basically untranscripted. The university indicates that they will keep letter grades internally for advising and financial aid, but that they won’t be on a student’s permanent academic record.
The LSA is the largest of Michigan’s 19 colleges and has approximately 19,700 undergraduate students.
Psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert criticized the approach, arguing that students need to learn how to handle ordinary academic setbacks.
“We’re raising a generation of students to believe that discomfort is dangerous,” Alpert, author of “Therapy Nation,” told Fox News Digital. “It isn’t. A bad grade can be upsetting, embarrassing and stressful. That’s not a mental health emergency. That’s college.”
It doesn’t say what happens to students who are housed in other colleges but are taking liberal arts courses as part of their core curriculum. Nor does it indicate what happens to students who, while receiving no perceivable grades, actually flunk out.
With more people calling out universities for not preparing students for the real world (and liberal arts being targeted specifically), I’d say this policy is a losing proposition on a whole lot of levels.
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