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AI is impacting everything from college curriculum to hiring to how people work.

Scaffolding skills and learning through challenge are key to the educational process.

The skills that make individuals uniquely human are what make them successful in a disrupted world.

You may have seen the news at the start of this academic year that the University of Michigan has decided to withhold grades from some members of the incoming first-year class to support their transition and mental health (Arsenault, 2026).

On the face of it, this might not be a terrible idea. The transition to college from high school is a challenging one. We all know that college-level work is very different from that at most high schools, on top of the critical shifts in identity development as Gomes et al. (2026) and others have noted, as well as challenges of increased freedom, access to people and situations that can be detrimental to one’s well-being, and the overwhelming need to prove oneself. We know that we have a mental health crisis in this country among young people (Mowreader, 2025). Any effort to support their wellbeing should be applauded.

That said, college students have spent the previous 12-plus years in institutions that presumably evaluated their daily and weekly performance using grades. They are experienced with this aspect of the educational process. Certainly, getting an A in college is and should be harder than in high school. Hiding or removing a piece of that evaluative experience doesn’t make the work any less challenging; it simply removes a critical piece of clarity from the equation.

In fact, in my work with young professionals, I often hear that one of the biggest challenges with the transition from college to work and life after college is that they stop receiving grades. They don’t know what A-level work looks like in the workplace or in life. They don’t know how to manage their time and productivity with projects that have no endpoint and don’t come with a syllabus and a grading rubric. The academic structure might be stressful and imperfect, but it is, in fact, all they know.

The bigger point is this: Why do we have this urgency to make everything easier? College is supposed to be hard.........

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