‘Maybe This Really is an Emergency’: When Even Lefty Profs Complain About Unprepared Incoming Students
“the mostly left-wing professors in the UC system are calling this out and saying, “Enough already.” If they’re doing that – Yeah, maybe this really is an emergency.”
The news that the University of Michigan will switch to Pass/Fail grading for incoming freshmen in the fall 2027 semester has generated a lot of national attention.
The Wall Street Journal reported:
The University of Michigan will drop grades for first-semester freshmen next year in an effort to “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals,” according to the school.
Instead of a letter grade, first-semester transcripts will show “pass or no credit.” The program is designed to help students “acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys,” the school said.
The program, set to start in fall 2027, applies to students in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, which enrolls about half of Michigan’s roughly 8,000 first-year students.
A Michigan spokesman declined to comment about how the university reached the decision to enact the pilot. Although grades won’t be recorded on student transcripts or affect grade-point averages, professors will still assign them internally to track eligibility for scholarships and academic awards.
Schools including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology have implemented similar “grade-covering” programs in past years.
The shift at Michigan, among the nation’s largest and best-known public universities, comes as schools wrestle with grade inflation and the need for remedial instruction for freshmen ill-prepared for college-level classes. University of California math and science professors have urged UC regents to reinstate entrance exams because so many freshmen were unprepared.
I had a chance to talk about this development with Laura Ingraham on The Ingraham Angle:
Partial Transcript (auto-generated, may contain transcription errors, lightly edited for transcript clarity)
Ingraham:
… Now, at this very moment, colleges should be asking whether standards have slipped too far, but they’re doing the opposite, lowering the bar. Here with reaction as William Jacobson, Cornell University Law Prof and Equal Protection Project founder. All right, Professor, I know you’ve seen this, you know this. I have seen this firsthand. What has happened to our students and is the University of Michigan doing them any favors?
WAJ:
I interact with a lot of students and the vast majority that I find are very motivated, but there is a societal problem. We have to acknowledge that collapse of our K-12 educational system under the weight of leftist indoctrination, critical race theory, DEI, politicization. We see it throughout with standards being lowered. And so really, while the students are on the front line of it, it’s a societal problem. It’s a teacher union problem.
It’s an educational system problem where we have dumbed down the curriculum to the point, as you pointed out, the schools are getting students who are completely unprepared.
So I think this is a national crisis. If you wanted to destroy our country, what would you do differently than the left over a generation has done to our educational system? This is a national emergency. We’re just seeing the signs of it.
Ingraham:
I think this is just one metric, right?
And one dean who’s a professor of women’s and gender studies at the University of Michigan about this new program they’re doing, said, “I believe this pilot program has the potential to not only address the alarming rates of stress, depression, anxiety, but to deliver on our core promise of a liberal arts and sciences college.” Professor, uh, <laugh> the objective knowledge, like knowledge, how to be an independent adult, know the world around you, know how to write, read, you know, the essential math skills, apparently that’s now out the window as long as you’re not stressed.
WAJ:
Well, if you lower expectations so far that students don’t have to meet any expectations, this is the result you get.
I think some students, and I have great empathy for them, do go through a hard time entering college. I mean, we’ve coming off the COVID shutdown. The students who are coming into college now are the ones who grew up in middle school and high school with those COVID lockdowns.
So there may be real problems, but this is not the answer. Dumbing down the system even further is not the answer. And when you do that, you harm other students. There are other students who do want to come to college, probably a majority of students, who want to come to college, want to compete, want to excel, want to meet high expectations. And this college reaction seems to be, we’re not going to do that. We’re going take a group of students who maybe have some serious problems and those should be dealt with, and we’re going to, with one blanket change of curriculum, one blanket change of grading, are going to dumb down the whole system.
It’s the wrong answer to what might be a real problem.
Ingraham:
Well, and of course, this is why, you know, we have to bring back the SAT as we’re seeing already the University of California system saying that was a mistake because guess what? The SAT might not be everything, and the ACT, but it is an objective measure of what you know. And it’s everything we get to – It’s a decent indicator of what you know.
WAJ:
Did you ever think we get to a place where the professors in the UC system are up in arms because they have so dumbed down the system, they don’t even have to take any standardized tests? So the professors, the mostly left-wing professors in the UC system are calling this out and saying, “Enough already.” If they’re doing that – Yeah, maybe this really is an emergency.
Ingraham:
Professor, you’re 100% correct. Great to see you as always.
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
“they have so dumbed down the system, they don’t even have to take any standardized tests? So the professors, the mostly left-wing professors in the UC system are calling this out and saying, “Enough already.”
Screw that.
You broke it, you bought it.
It’s possible that the students they rejected may have been more prepared than the ones they accepted.
Possible, but this is a widespread problem. Test-optional was one of many ruinous decisions on the path to a dumbed-down society.
Test-optional means some students will be admitted that objectively lack the same qualities as other students, and likely would not be admitted if they took the test.
At the UC system SAT & ACT tests are not optional. Since 2020 they refuse to accept standardized test scores. That leaves only high school GPA and life experience. High schools with low standards yield many students with high GPA.
It’s almost a certainty that many of those who were rejected were more prepared for college than those who were accepted.
Nah…society has bought it to our detriment. It’s time to tell all those lefties we told you so; now let the grown-ups put the stakes back in the game.
You are all missing the entire point.
Governor Newsom‘s children, and all the other children of the elite, attend private schools.
K through 12 has not been dumbed down for them.
They were not closed for two years during Covid.
They graduate with an excellent education, fully prepared for college.
These are the future leaders of America.
Not the proles who need remedial classes to attend college.
They might as well just change the meaning of GPA.
Rather than “Grade Point Average”, it should mean “General Participation Average”.
I give “personally meaningful academic journeys” an F.
Pass fail to protect their “mental health?”
Good god our society is done
Pass or fail to protect their “mental health?”
Couldn’t they just change the name of the school? That’s what a judge ruled in the Stonewall Jackson School lawsuit.
It’s not even “pass/fail.” They’re calling it “pass/no credit.”
The difference is that no failure shows up on your record — failing is just like having dropped the class. MIT had this 50+ years ago. The difference is that they didn’t do it for EVERY class, just a limited set.
Nothing new. I may have to drag out the Heinlein essay again.
If they look like they’re unprepared
And act like they’re unprepared
And even DEI officers think they’re unprepared
There’s a slight possibility they’re unprepared
Off topic, but I agree and it really pissed me off
I think heads have to roll
This is crazy that Republicans can not hold secrets amd that turncoats are everywhere
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/08/that-scares-hell-me-clinton-nuclear-football-carrier/
One of the reasons I left the Army in the 70s was because of a similar problem. The Army kept lowering standards because they couldn’t get the troops to abide by them (not that the troops couldn’t, they just wouldn’t). This was not a problem that couldn’t have been addressed with the enforcement of discipline, more and better training, and the doling out of necessary punishments. I didn’t want to go to war with an Army that couldn’t enforce discipline in its own troops. That seemed an easy way to get killed. There were individual leaders I would have followed into battle, but the majority of troops were not people I would have trusted with my life.
Lo those many years ago that I was in college, the policy was that you could deem one class per semester as pass/fail. The logic was that the school demanded you take core classes, some of which you may not have aptitude or interest in taking, thus they’d be at the bottom of your priority list. I do not see where this hampered me in my educational journey.
Here, both things can be true; the K-12 system is beyond saving, thus unprepared students, and freshmen are having a difficult time adjusting.
Since this is clearly labeled as a pilot project, let them try it and report out in a couple of years.
rats… I so loved to watch the incoming freshman acting all BMOC and being crushed with the first exams….
Instead of a letter grade, for the first ten years transcripts will show “pass or no credit.” This is designed to help students “acclimate” to the demands of college which in some cases may take longer than ten years.
“No credit” being the feelings friendly way of saying “you failed.”
Meh. The educrats will just use this to lobby for more tax money.
It’s the same thing with just about all government spending. Whatever the amount it is never enough.
Professor Jacobsen nailed it when he mentioned the collapse of the k-12 system. Colleges aren’t going to fix the damage done for a dozen years before the students got there.
On the other hand, they seem to be determined to make it even worse.
As a Bowdoin undergrad I learned that sometimes required classes were hard just to weed out the weak students. This was pre-Mandami, and it was super selective and super expensive. You could take as many courses as you wanted in 4 years and get as many degrees as you could in your time, but serious commitment was needed. You could fail in extra classes that you took on a lark, and it was no harm no foul. But one did learn failure, time management and success.
Grad school was hard. Some classes were nearly impossible, but that was wonderful because it forced one to WORK for grades. In a graduate course on compiler construction, on the final I earned a B. Every other student in the class got an F on the same assignment/test. I was happy that I knew how to work on complex tasks that seemed impossible.
Students should expect to work to the point of exhaustion and fail some of the time. That is an important life lesson.
“sometimes required classes were hard just to weed out the weak students.”
But that was before the goal statement changed from “turn out well-prepared graduates” to “shovel as much tuition money as possible into the general fund to pay administrator bloat.”
Again, there is a very, very important point here. Collegiate administrative bloat (and the related bloat at public secondary schools) is a place to dump the SAT-1000-level people that graduated college. Colleges have, in no small part, raised tuition to be able to pay the cost of hiring non-intelligent college graduates. This is most certainly not what the Federal student loan programs, Pell grants, scholarships, UNCF and the like were created to make possible.
A hard stop on Federal funding of post-secondary education would put and end to this idiocy, but it would take 20 years to work out. No more student loans (but pay back the outstanding ones) and no more HELOC-for-college tax breaks. Keep 529 plans: secondary taxes on already taxed income, when used for college education, is not a good idea. Also keep the personal gift exemption for education.
Keep the GI bill benefits, but put a cap on the costs. Keep the specialized military colleges and specialized college paths for military needs (like for translators).
Absolutely not. The infantilization of higher education needs to end.
Laura is right, they need to bring back the SAT or ACT. However, those tests do not measure knowledge and they’re not designed to do that. Achievement tests do that. SATs are scholastic aptitude tests and are designed to assess student readiness for college and to predict their success.
Always good to see and hear the Professor on National Television
Colleges need to apply the Pareto Principle: 80% of the students attending really have no business being there, either because they lack intrinsic motivation, or because they lack the intellectual chops to handle academic rigor. I’ve said this for years.
We’ve got to get away from the credentialism that merely leads to viewing a piece of paper as being the meal ticket to success. I saw this time and time again in my eleven years as an adjunct math teacher at the community college.
“Meal ticket” is the chief reason why most of these kids are in school in the first place – they are less interested in learning and knowing and understanding than they are in getting a six-figure salary. That’s why they cheat, beg, whine, and even try bribery to get good grades, and they have a transactional attitude towards grades – “I paid for this class, I’m the customer, therefore I deserve an A, and if I don’t get it I’m going to complain to the dean and give you a horrible student evaluation.”
And when they graduate with thousands of dollars of debt for a bullshit piece of paper for a bullshit degree and the only job they can get is barista for $19.50/hr, it’s not hard to see why they’re upset. They’ve been misled by the education establishment, which has primarily served its own interests by constantly drumming into the kids’ heads for 18 years that only losers don’t go to college.
Generally correct about the 80%, and their motivation. OTOH, the original California 3-tier system can be used. 50% go to community college; 30% go to CalState; 20% go to UC. This can work, or could work until AI-based cheating made it so that everybody can try and cheat all the time while learning almost nothing.
The meal-ticket analysis is good. Where did this mentality come from and — importantly — how did payment for this sort of fraud come from? The 1971 Duke Power decision got rid of aptitude testing in employment (except for the ASVAB, where skills really matter?), and the SAT took the place of work skills tests. It was not a direct replacement, but a good one, and employers really knew the value of intelligence testing — and still do. The SAT was a gateway to graduation from serious colleges: score >1400 combined on SAT and you are highly likely to succeed at technical work. How did the payment work? When college loans were made possible via HELOC or similar mortgage-backed methods, the race to HIGH college costs was on.
Now 50 years later, we are in a bad spot with higher education. Completely useless degrees are funded by middle class mortgages… which are now controlled by the feds. All the students with SAT scores in the 1000 range want the useless degrees.
Perhaps the most important thing Trump has done is to work towards ending the racial preference system at the Federal level, partially undoing the harm from Duke Power, End the mortgage funding of student costs, and end the Federal student loan program. Education will eventually fix itself without the dual poisons of racial preference and avarice.
Oh, absolutely – the college degree quickly became a proxy for intelligence testing, and for a while it made sense, when a relatively small percentage of people even attended college.
But college degrees, like most other commodities (and at this point I would argue that’s exactly what it has become), decrease in value when there are more of them. Hence more people are working on grad degrees since bachelor’s degrees are pretty worthless. We’ve gone past the point of diminishing returns with diploma credentialism.
For those that have not dealt with it, this may be a surprise. Degree credentialism is hard wired into almost all public employee union contracts. Get rid of public employee unions, and something like 50% of all useless degrees, particularly masters degrees, will vanish inside 2 years.
Yeah, “maybe” just maybe. This is well beyond the “emergency” stage; it’s a dire state of affairs. And yet some universities now are suggesting eliminating letter grades and using Pass/Fail grades only. IOW students arrive unprepared and leave unprepared. Why bother going to college?
When I started as a freshman at Case Western Reserve in 1969, freshman courses in Case Institute of Technology were pass-fail, not to make them easier but because they were so hard. I had a dorm-mate who was 16 and a mathematics instructor who was 14, not because classes were easy but because they were geniuses. I took one course “across the quad,” a course in basic psychology, and got a C, which gave me a 2.0 average because in my other courses, including the very difficult Physiology and Biophysics, my grades were P. At midterms and finals, some classmates just freaked out. They would scream from their dorm windows in the evenings just to let off steam. The rest of us called it “Animal House” — the movie of that name would not come out until nearly a decade later. The grading was so unforgiving that it was helpful to some of them to know that P was an option, rather than C or D.
Some similarities here with state university. Math for me is HARD. Calc was a nightmare, but CS580 kicked my rear. I wound up taking it *five* times to pass, mostly because I was too stubborn to buy a programable calculator that did formula storage. The professor wrote exams intentionally hard as nails so a 50% could actually be an A, and if you bombed an exam you still could get an A at the end if you worked for it (unlike the 90/80/70…) Got to the point where I knew the material backwards and forwards, but doing Taylor and McLaurin series without a formula storage calculator during an exam…Nope. Once I broke down and bought the calculator, I breezed through that class, proving that kids can be smart and dumb at the same time.
First semester will be become never ending party. The great disconnect will become second semester.
You are at least 40 years behind the times.
Back in the 1980s, I worked on the shipping dock at Wang with a guy we can call “DW”. He knew how to do hard physical work, had done a 2-year stint in the US Army, and was a phenomenally skilled road course driver. We worked side by side loading and unloading trucks, second shift, with no air conditioning and a 15 minute break every 2 hours. It was a 6-hour full-body workout every day.
DW was a good-looking 6’1″ black guy and a hustler. He used his Pell Grants, GI Bill benefits, student loans and scholarships to “go to college”. What he did in college, for exactly one term, was to buy and use a giant pile of cocaine, chase women, drink vodka-spiked lemonade all the time and thrash automobiles. He never intended to learn anything: it was a paid 100 day bender. He loved it. There was never going to be a 2nd semester for DW.
Leave a Comment