The University of Michigan is stripping letter grades from freshmen transcripts and hiding them behind a pass/no-credit wall, all in the name of fighting a "mental health crisis" — another public institution declaring that standards are the problem, not the solution.

Starting this fall, the university's College of Literature, Science, and the Arts — the largest of Michigan's 19 colleges, enrolling nearly 20,000 students — will grade first-semester freshmen on a pass/no credit basis instead of issuing letter grades, the school announced. Transcripts will simply state that all first-semester courses were automatically pass/no credit. The grades won't factor into GPAs.

But here's the tell: the grades will still be internally recorded. The university will use them for academic awards, scholarships, internships, academic advising, professional opportunities, and for students switching to majors outside the LSA college. So the administration still wants to know who's performing and who isn't. They just don't want anyone else to see it — and they don't want students to feel the sting of accountability.

"We believe that covering grades will help students start strong and curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals," the LSA college wrote in its statement. The college also claimed the policy will "foster collaboration instead of competition."

Translation: competition is now treated as a public health hazard at a major public university.

Michigan isn't alone. The New York Post reports that similar programs have been adopted by MIT, Caltech, Swarthmore College, and Wellesley College. The precedent is spreading.

Psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert, author of "Therapy Nation," pushed back hard. "We've gotten to the point where normal stress is being treated like a mental health problem," Alpert told the Post. "Getting a bad grade is disappointing. It can be embarrassing. It can make you anxious. But that doesn't make it psychologically harmful."

Alpert added: "Your boss isn't going to hide a bad performance review because it might make you anxious. Life doesn't come with grade covering. At some point, young people have to learn that feeling bad is not the same thing as being harmed."

The mental health framing is now ubiquitous across college sports and academics alike. South Carolina women's basketball guard Maddy McDaniel withdrew from the university entirely this month after stepping away from the team for what CBS Sports described as "mental health reasons." Coach Dawn Staley voiced full support. McDaniel was the team's only true point guard heading into a season where the Gamecocks are coming off a national runner-up finish. The athletic stakes are real — but so is the pattern of "mental health" becoming the all-purpose justification for every institutional retreat from expectation.

Nobody is dismissing genuine psychological distress. But the question is whether universities are treating students or shielding them from the friction that produces competence. Michigan's own policy proves the contradiction: they still need the real grades for anything that actually matters. They're just unwilling to let those grades carry their natural consequences — motivation, differentiation, accountability — for one critical semester.

The LSA college did not return a request for comment from the Post.

When a public university decides that the transcript — the one document an employer or graduate school uses to measure what a student actually did — should be scrubbed of useful information, the question isn't whether students feel better. The question is who benefits when nobody can tell who earned what.