The University of Michigan recently announced that beginning in fall 2027, first-semester freshmen in its College of Literature, Science and the Arts will receive pass/fail grades rather than traditional letter grades. The university says the change is intended to relieve pressure, encourage academic exploration, and help “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals.”
First things first: not only do we not know enough about the idiosyncrasies of Michigan’s plan, we’re also aware of just how complex academic policy is. So we’re not weighing in on whether this particular policy is good or bad.
It’s just that it raises a much bigger question, one we see playing out on campuses and in families everywhere: what actually helps young people’s mental health?
The answer to this question often swings in two extremes. 1) If something is causing a young person distress, remove or delay it. And 2) Life is hard. Stop accommodating kids and make them deal with it.
But there’s a huge amount of space between avoidance and flooding, and that middle is where mental health is built.
Mental health is not the absence of distress. A mentally healthy person experiences anxiety, disappointment, rejection, embarrassment, failure, uncertainty, and heartbreak.
Mental health is about our capacity to experience those moments and have ways to manage what happens inside of us. Can I regulate myself enough to feel my feet on the ground? Can I do something hard while I’m distressed, without needing that distress to come down to zero? Can I tolerate disappointment without turning it into a verdict about who I am? Can I ask for help? Can I recover?
Consider a student, let’s call her Emma. Emma arrives at college after doing really well academically for years. In her freshman Speechwriting course, she gets a paper prompt that's ambiguous. There's no obvious "right" answer. And suddenly, she starts thinking, "I don't know how to do this.Which then becomes, "maybe I'm not as smart as I thought" or even "I don't belong at this school."
Now imagine Emma told her professor about her fears. If the professor makes her assignment go away, her anxiety will probably decrease immediately. Her brain learns something too: I feel better when the hard thing goes away.
Avoidance is compelling because it’s instant discomfort-relief. But repeated avoidance makes a feared experience feel more threatening over time. If the way I learn to manage anxiety is by finding an exit ramp, I don’t get the experiences that teach me something different: I can feel anxious and still do this. I know what helps me when my body starts to panic. I can get through something that feels really uncomfortable.
The alternative isn’t for her professor to say, “too bad, deal with it,” and proceeded to have her to stand and present in front of thirty classmates. Feeling overwhelmed and alone - or worse, shamed - leads to flooding, and that’s not exactly a great breeding ground for healthy coping either.
We want to land in between. When faced with something difficult, we want to build coping skills to tolerate distress, manage worries, and disprove self-doubt. This sets us up to grow, adapt, evolve.
Maybe she gives the presentation to a few close friends. Maybe someone shows her how to talk to herself in a way that helps her calm down. Maybe she watches YouTube videos on conquering anxiety around speechwriting.
But here’s the most important point: we may need to start by changing what success looks like. Success isn’t getting her anxiety from a 10 to a 0. The goal is to get it from a 10 to an 8 and eventually to a 6 - and then Emma realizes that at a 6, she can take the first step. She can write the presentation. She can stay in her space. She can feel anxious and still do something hard.
When the next presentation is assigned, it may not feel like a 10 anymore. Not because someone removed the thing that made her anxious and not because someone threw her into it before she was ready, but because she has new evidence about herself: I have felt this way before, and I have watched myself move through it.
That’s coping. That’s mental health. That’s resilience.
This is the part of the conversation about young people’s mental health that we don’t think gets nearly enough attention. What if we spent less time debating accommodation vs. exposure and more time talking about how to build coping skills?
Any time we reduce or delay a source of pressure, there’s another question worth asking: What are we helping a young person build in the space we’ve created?
Take Michigan - just as an example to make this concrete. A lower-stakes first semester may give students more room to take academic risks and loosen some of the achievement stress they arrive on campus carrying. But if mental health is the goal, imagine pairing that relief from pressure with deliberate opportunities to build real coping skills.
What if students were actually taught what to do when the pressure returns? What if we taught them what’s happening when they get a bad grade and their brain immediately goes from I did badly to Maybe I’m not smart enough to be here? What if we taught them how to catch the spiral before one bad test becomes my future is screwed? How to get their feet back on the ground. How to ask for help when they’ve never needed it before. How to feel really disappointed, have a bad test, and yes - still get up and go to class the next morning.
Lowering the pressure can create the space. Building coping skills is what we can do with that space.
Because eventually there will be an outcome that isn’t pass/fail. And a bad grade is just one version of all the hard things that eventually come our way: jobs we don’t get, feedback that stings, relationships that get messy, mistakes we can’t undo, and things we work incredibly hard for that still don’t work out. We can’t remove all of those moments, and throwing young people into them without support doesn’t prepare them for those moments either.
The work is in the middle: helping a young person experience an amount of distress they can manage while building the skills that allow them, over time, to manage more.
And this is where Michigan’s other stated goal - exploration - gets interesting. We tend to think exploration becomes easier when the possibility of a bad outcome goes away. But real exploration, by definition, means we don’t know how something will turn out. You take the class you might not be good at. You apply for the job you might not get. You take on a project you’ve never done before. You move to a new city without being sure how it will go.
What allows us to do those things isn’t knowing they’ll go well. It’s knowing we have ways to cope if they don’t.
The more we trust our ability to handle disappointment, uncertainty and struggle, the less certainty we need before trying something new. Coping skills don’t compete with exploration. Coping skills make exploration possible.
So sure, give young people lower-stakes time to explore. But don’t assume lower-stakes time - on its own - will improve mental health. Use that time to help them build the skills they’ll need when pressure returns, when something goes wrong, or when life simply doesn’t go the way they hoped.
Because mental health isn’t a life with enough exit ramps. Mental health is built through an accumulation of experiences: I felt something hard. I had support. I found ways to cope. I moved through it. And now, the next time something hard comes my way, I have a little more evidence: I’ve been here before. I can handle this.
Dr. Becky Kennedy + Dr. Sheryl Ziegler
