The University of Michigan, one of the most prestigious and competitive public universities in the United States, is adding its sterling credentials to the academic campaign against the mental health crisis. Or, to take a more sceptical view: the campaign for the upkeep of student self-esteem.

Michigan is the latest higher-education institution to adopt a “grade covering” policy that will not record first-semester freshman grades in a bid to reduce student stress. The policy, effective from the autumn of 2027, will affect about 3,500 first-years in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, the largest of the university’s 19 colleges.

This announcement is playing out against the surge in anxiety, depression and other mental-health problems reported among young people since the advent of social media, a surge that might thankfully be peaking. As the University of Michigan’s own Public Health News Center announced last autumn, “college students are reporting lower rates of depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and suicidal thoughts” for the third consecutive year. This is based on findings from the nation’s largest study of student mental health, which involves responses from more than 84,000 students at 135 higher-education institutions. Apparently, though, the numbers are still high enough to warrant further interventions, such as eliminating the stress of grading, which costs the university nothing.

Pull the camera back on the higher-education landscape, and what comes into focus is a generation’s worth of coddling: helicopter parents, grade inflation, trigger warnings, sensitivity training, speech codes, safe spaces and cuddle rooms, with an ever-growing army of campus bureaucrats ready to enforce increasingly absurd institutional etiquette mandates. It’s difficult to untangle cause from effect, but the more administrators played the role of in loco parentis, the more the students went loco. By 2023, more than half of female students were reporting symptoms of depression.

There may also be legal pressure on universities to accommodate anyone claiming a disability. In 2018, for example, disabled students in a lawsuit accused Stanford University of pressuring them to leave campus after a personal crisis. As the Atlantic reported last December, the number of undergrads who qualify for disability exemptions has exploded to unfathomable levels: 34% at Amherst and more than 20% at Harvard and Brown. As the wealthy kids were getting more time to take tests, one researcher noted that only 3-4% of students at lower-status public two-year colleges receive such accommodations. These accommodations can take many forms. For instance, according to the Atlantic, a public college in California gave a student permission to bring their mother to class.

It’s only fitting that the bureaucrats at the University of Michigan would dedicate themselves to the task of cushioning the impact of freshmanitis, the culture shock students experience when transitioning from high school to college-level work. The same university had spent a quarter of a billion dollars on DEI initiatives over a decade, possibly the most ambitious — and wasteful — social-justice bureaucracy in higher education. As revealed by the New York Times, professors received training in “antiracist pedagogy”, and DEI officials distributed handouts on “Identifying and Addressing Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture,” such as “worship of the written word”. Last March, the university announced that its Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, as well as its Office for Health Equity and Inclusion, will close.

Michigan is not breaking the mould on letting freshmen take classes on a pass-fail basis. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), California Institute of Technology, Swarthmore College and Wellesley College have similar policies. It’s inevitable that as the university functions by the market rules of consumer choice, rather than professorial fiat, it will do what it must to appeal to the consumer. This is especially true if the consumer has wealthy parents.