The University of Michigan has around a 15% acceptance rate. How is it possible that they’re letting in kids who aren’t ready to do college level work? What are they selecting for?
Our professor assigned us to write a fast fourier transform, and when we had class next week apparently everyone claimed that it was too difficult so he changed the assignment to "find an implementation online and write about it"
I feel really grateful I graduated before the advent of LLMs because it was really easy to stand out as a good student when the standards are apparently so low.
Side tangent but in the same class he caught people zero-citation copy-pasting from Wikipedia on the papers we were assigned to write, and the guys acted like they had no idea you couldn't do that.
That's the big thing - the college might be dropping the first semester grades so they can squeeze a second semester of tuition out of kids.
I feel like it has always been this way. I went to a small private university. The natural sciences and especially the pre-med students had their days fully packed, like the only time you could even have a moment to talk about anything was at the cafeteria during meals.
Then there was the business department. The college athletes apparently picked business as a major because you have to pick something. You couldn't guess what was their preferred minor and why... The overwhelming preferred minor was music because the buildings for department of business and music were adjacent.
Compare that to the pre meds who were always worried about getting a B and somehow "ruining their chances at med school".
I actually think it makes a lot of sense to go for some kind of basic business degree if you're angling to go into professional sports. Having some basic concepts of basic business law, finance, etc. seems pretty important for someone looking to shop their abilities and likeness around and have some understanding of the contract negotiations they'll hopefully be a part of. Outside of the gym its probably the most relevant kind of skills being taught on a college campus for that career path.
I guess this sort of thing explains the drastic dip in quality in the jr engineers lately that I noticed.
'give them an F' sounds good. But that impacts a lot of people.
What you need to do is move the material down a bit. Within reason.
Propitiated, in many cases, by the unnoticed run-up of their student loan debt balance.
This seems most likely. If you think of college as yet another extractive business (and you can bet the administrators at colleges think this way), then students that drop out are simply cu$tomers you are failing to retain: Pure lost revenue.
that sounds unbelievable. Not calling you out by any means i'm just shocked! I can comprehend tuning down the difficulty but not to the level of find some code online and write about it.
For our senior project class, one group of students successfully incorporated as a startup and sold their project to the city as a SaSS app, and my group ended up open sourcing our cross platform app.
Everyone in the program could code - really well - by the time they got to their junior year. Those who couldn't were weeded out early on.
May have helped they the entire first 2 years were taught in native languages with manual memory management.
It was rare to find people who actually "got" computers, and learned things beyond what was taught in classes cause they just liked technology. Those of us who just really liked tinkering with our computers knew who the other ones like us were. And it still feels like that after working as a professional in the industry for the better part of a decade.
I'm pretty sure most of the people I work with have no idea what a .zshrc file is, or how to configure things to optimize their workflow, or use keyboard shortcuts, etc.
Two of the freshman classes were weed out classes and they did their job well.
First, college can be a very abrupt shift from "someone is watching over you" to "you, and only you, are responsible for yourself." If you slack off in high school, someone--your parents, your teachers, your school administration--is likely to get on your ass to put you back on track, and this is more likely to be the case for people who get into tougher colleges ("helicopter parents" are very real things). But in college, if you sleep in and miss all of your classes... no one is going to care. Well, your parents might, but your parents aren't with you in college to do anything about it. I've seen quite a few people who went from straight A's in high school to failing most of their college courses because of this.
Second, a lot of those accepted are going to be the smartest person in their class, who are now going to a college where they might be average--or even below average.
Finally, college courses are generally more difficult than a high school course, even an AP course, teaching the same material; there's just a lot more that's expected as students. Freshmen courses generally mitigate this somewhat to help ease in students, but by the time you get to a senior-level course, reading multiple research papers a day for per class is considered pretty normal. Of course, if you're a kid with a truckload of AP courses who let you skip your first year of college, now you're dropped into courses that expect you to have already adjusted to college life first.
Interesting, that's not my observation at all. Instead freshman classes were the most grueling experiences, intentionally weed-out classes to try to detect and, well, weed-out early those who wouldn't have the combination of grit, intelligence and organization skills to make it to the end of the degree.
I speak somewhat hyperbolically, it was never _unfair_, but the classes absolutely were paced and had homework/exam loads that you would simply be unable to cope with if you were trying to half-ass it. At my college, Calc I and Physics 1 were the big freshman showstoppers. I tested out of calc 1, but my IB HL was chemistry and as such I had a chemist's disdain (and begrudging respect) for the more academic science of physics, and while the actual topics weren't difficult, there was a LOT of homework and the exams left no stone unturned.
Comparatively, jr+ classes tended to be much more relaxed, focused more on learning the material than ensuring you are willing to do 8-10 hours of physics homework per week.
Every college is different though, I suppose.
So for instance, one of the notorious freshman weed out classes was a class that *every* engineering student took. But then each individual engineering major had their own handful of pain in the ass classes that showed up as the engineering curriculum diverged.
That’s what college life was like for me in a top 10 US school in 2003-2008 and was true of that school since 1954.
20 years ago UofM had a 50% acceptance rate, from some light google searching. Apparently they received 115k applications last year vs under 25k in 2005.
The biggest factor is that applying is a lot easier in the age of web applications, common application, and students being advised to send 10-15 applications out. In the 2000s even a good student might apply to 3-5 schools and feel they had covered enough.
but it's always been this way since forever. Why would it need to change now and not a hundred years ago? What circumstances are different?
Kids will take multiple APs (taking 10+ isn't unheard of, and in a lot of high schools is expected), do multiple extracurriculars (debate, MUN, DECA sports, academic olympiads, theatre), volunteering (NHS, CSF, etc), and even take college classes in high school.
On top of that while tests are optional, most students still submit their SAT and ACT, and the expectation of 1500+ and 35+ still holds.
And even then there's no guarantee you'll get in.
Most applicants who successfully get into Ivies, impacted majors with single digit acceptance rates at Mich or Cal tier programs like EECS or a BBA, and other peer programs are basically burnt out by 17-18 (the age most kids at these programs now matriculate).
And the first semester is not impactful in any shape or form. It's best to take summary and intro classes as P/NP to even the playing field and then throw in a weed-out class (in CS that was historically data structures or OS).
So many HNers complain about how the younger generation is hyper-competitive yet when universities start taking steps to help reduce that they start kvetching.
Heck, with my profile from the late 2000s and early 2010s (right when everything became hyper-competitive and optimized), I actually wouldn't have a shot at most programs at Mich let alone my Alma mater, especially when I compare it to my younger sibling's profile who also attended a Mich tier engineering undergrad in the 2020s.
Well I learned over a decade ago that they have had Pass/no-credit for the first year implemented for years... So at this point it wouldn't surprise me if you said it's been going on for two decades (at min.)
Again, I think people are having the same reaction I had "what, MIT just gets off scotch free for the first year?!". Decade later, watching it help relieve the stress from their rat race of 110% from their childhoods... Man is it worth it. And everyone still loves hiring people out of MIT
> giving you time to adjust to factors like increased workloads and variations in academic preparation and teaching methods. [0]
I can 100% get behind that logic.
I can't get behind a college saying they're doing it to "curb a mental health crisis".
[0] https://registrar.mit.edu/classes-grades-evaluations/grades/...
> curb a mental health crisis
In this context, both have the exact same meaning, of "stop freshmen who are used to overachieving their entire lives from taking a header off the tallest buildings on campus because they're not used to being less than the top 5% at everything"
If you get a D or F, there’s no external record you even attempted the class, rather than a record that you attempted and failed it.
> yet when universities start taking steps to help reduce that they start kvetching
Your argument is hard to follow. It is prohibitively hard, to the point of being unhealthy, to getting admitted to the University of Michigan. Okay, but how does this policy solve for or address that in any way? Wouldn’t the solution be to increase capacity to meet demand, thus relieving those pressures that create the conditions for them to admit young adults that are suffering from health issues that the universities admissions policies itself precipitated?
And UMich Ann Arbor is already massive - 8,000 students enroll a year.
Also 32,000 undergrads is not “massive” by any measurement[0], especially when accounting for the population of the state of Michigan, much less the broader United States.
O. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_public_u...
Dropping a semester of grades is a cover up for the symptoms, not a fix. A better fix would be stress management and realistic expectations. Building your identity or self-worth around going to a particular school is the insane part. It's great to have big goals, but you have to separate those goals from defining you. It seems many kids today don't make that distinction. Pick a cheap state school with a decent program, get a scholarship, and start living life. All this prestige and pedigree is the type of stuff we should be trying to destroy.
You're right about this one. I'd never get accepted today at the state university I went to back in the 90s. Back then, applying to college meant taking the SAT, filling out an application, and maybe submitting an essay. That was it. Then you figured out how you'd pay for it. They didn't care that much about AP courses, extracurricular activities, career shadowing, volunteering, college level credits, or anything like that. Sure, they were nice bonuses but nobody treated them as hard requirements like they do today. Hell, my high school didn't even offer AP courses, so I couldn't take one even if I wanted to.
Now, my kid is approaching college age, and all these college admissions coaches are breathing down my neck to get her to take 40 AP courses, join the debate club and chess club, play Sportsball every year, take 4 years of a foreign language, do volunteering, tutor other kids, and then take extra courses at the local community college, and that doing all that will only improve her already-low chances of acceptance. Good grief!
Nepo babies and affirmative action babies. (Dont @ me about Gratz, lets not pretend its no longer happening)
The students that come out of there are just normal. There is nothing special in the UoM sauce. They have more ego as their state school grad who makes the same money as them.
Sure there is a floor, they didn't let the alcoholic nepo baby in. But the people that made it to entry level Fortune 20 companies were the same tier, or maybe they were worse. Best engineers were people from random schools around the country that just wanted to work there.
Note: This didn't apply to people that had been there for 2 or 3 years. After that, even the UoM grads had their ego destroyed and they were normal people again.
Plenty of kids are small-town nepo. Daddy threatens to call his lawyer every time they get a C or get in trouble, and teachers and administrators cave.
What they are trying to do is keep the kids that would otherwise do well but might freak out in the first semester. Seems pretty fine to me especially since those are grades that if we are being honest really don't matter anyways.
So what do you mean with "uncertain environment"?
As someone that graduated when you started and was much closer to 08, it turned out to be a non-issue for everyone I know that went to college with me.
There is a real issue that housing is unreasonably expensive in many areas, which we could fix via the innovative strategy of not making it illegal to build housing.
Here is real wages with cost of living factored in for a bunch of locations in the US. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release?rid=439
This data shows that real wages are rising even with cost of living factored in.
The data don't support the story you are telling, at least not on a 17 year time scale. Most places including LA and New York actually show the opposite. Real wages are rising faster than cost of living in the long term just about everywhere in the US.
I understand the argument, and housing is a problem, but there just isn't much to support the doom and gloom narrative if you don't use cherry picked data from opeds. I suspect that a lot of people have distorted views about what they should be able to afford.
People point to the 1960s as the "golden age" where everyone could afford everything on a single person working an easy entry-level job. However, that is also a meme, not reality. According to the census bureau median family income in 1960 was $5,600, which is $58,946.59 in Jan 2024 dollars. It's $83,730 in 2024. For individual males, in 1960 it was $4,100 ($43,157.33 Jan 2024 dollars) and $71,090 in 2024.
Sources:
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1962/demo/p60-03...
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-28...
The source I provided specifically does not look at total income but real wages compared to cost of living. Did you look at the data you are arguing against?
Also, you are wrong about people working more hours. Here's the actual numbers. We are working slightly fewer hours than we have been on average for the past 20 years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAETP.
Has it occurred to you that the data really just doesn't support your perception? People have been giving you sources that refute what you are saying at every level. I get it. I keep reading and seeing people talk about how awful everything is, but I just can't find hard evidence that this is the case on a broad basis. You should look into the concept of the "vibe-cession". People are convincing themselves that things are getting worse based on talk and perception, and, well, one of the limits of humanity is that perception is reality inside your head.
Kids have "managed" this by dropping out of college.
Yes. We should ignore things like school shootings, which have long been described as the result of mental health issues. Ignore PTSD. Soldiers can just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. By all means, ignore the mental health of a rape victim or a child abuse victim. They can just tough it out. Clearly, that's the better strategy.
Oh, and you've been working in this field for how long?
> I was not going to engage
Then don't.
"Is raising mental health awareness causing more harm than good?", https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/analyst-comment/is-raisi...
"Are We Overdoing Mental Health Awareness?", https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/silicon-psyche/20250...
Once you're on your own nobody coddles you and it can be brutal.
So again I ask. What's the harm?
Hiring practices expanding to include multiple take-home exercises to prove competency.
Students not fully learning foundational knowledge they’ll need later because the class is an easy pass.
I've never cared about where the degree of someone comes from. You really think and employer is going to look at UofM and say "Oh, they gave their students a 1 semester reprieve, obviously they are of lower quality"?
> Hiring practices expanding to include multiple take-home exercises to prove competency.
Why would the policy of UofM change the hiring practices of companies that are not UofM? Where's the connection?
> Students not fully learning foundational knowledge they’ll need later because the class is an easy pass.
This may be a real harm, but ultimately they'll have to learn the foundational knowledge to continue going to UofM. Plenty of students fail to learn foundational knowledge outside of UofM, I know because I had to tutor them.
Yes. This will be evident on the transcript. It won’t reduce a student from “must-hire” to “do not interview.” But it could make a marginal difference when two students are compared.
One has all A and the other has all P. If the all A is Ohio State and the all P is Michigan, if I’m otherwise indifferent I might hire Ohio State.
The transcript? Employers aren't pulling transcripts. I've done hiring interviews and reviews, the transcript has never come up.
About the only place this could come up is higher education.
This seems like you are reaching for straws.
While I still think it's a disservice to the student, I'd be curious to hear from those that lived through this: Both those that attended and graduated and those that had to drop out.
For the former I'm guessing there's not much to report. I'd be curious about the latter.
As a student: Grades are one of the clearest signals on whether you're a good fit for a major or topic you're interested in, you need more work, or you need to trim down the number of classes.
Not providing that clear, cumulative signal is a major disservice to the students.
Also, UofM is expensive so dragging it benefits only the financials for the school.
It sounds harsh but it’s an important reality check for the student.
> That's the slippery slope fallacy. That's not what's being proposed and not what's going to happen.
They have proposed 1 semester, if they propose extending it then I'll be right along side you saying that's ridiculous. However, it's just as likely that they'll say "Actually, 1 semester was too long, we'll just do it for 1/2 a semester".
No it's not, because that's a tangentially related thing. You can't say "because social promotion is widely practiced, colleges will eventually eliminate grades" That's a non-sequitur. It'd be just as silly as me making the argument that "because some classes at my college were pass/fail, eventually they'll all be pass fail". That's the slippery slope argument.
> Own your argument man
That's not my argument, dude. And claiming it is is bad faith bro.
> If you are ok with end result, say so.
The end result of a single semester not being graded? Yeah, I'm fine with that. Because it's just as likely the university finds it's a mistake and rolls it back as it is that they expand it. It's also likely that they don't do anything with it.
That's my argument. That this policy is probably positive and worth trying. My argument isn't "nobody should ever be graded ever". That's a straw-man that you've cooked up.
It's just 1 semester and also gives students time to switch majors if they determine it's not for them (which is also common).
For most schools, it’s the opposite.
For folks qualified to get in, they will be selected. For folks at the marginal threshold, it’s luck of the draw.
> Clearly the entire thing is broken.
I agree with your sentiment, but for opposite reason. We need to scale down the number of people at R1 schools and develop a more robust system of technical and trade schools (imho).
The spreadsheet types have taken over the universities from the professors (it started decades ago), so I don’t think that this change will happen unless and until the current system implodes.
Also, they may need an adjustment period, which makes sense.
I think we need to wait and see how it works, before blindly criticizing a possible good idea
What matters is your major and whether it is a well respected program.
A CS@Texas student will have the ability to open the exact same doors professionally and prestige wise as a CS@Brown student.
You have Ivies, Ivy Tier Privates (Stanford, Chicago, Duke, USC, Caltech, MIT, NYU, Northwestern, Georgetown, CMU), and Public Ivies (Cal, UCLA, UCSD, Mich, UIUC, UW, UT, GT, Purdue, UNC Chapel Hill, UVA) that all recruit the same kind of applicant and place in the same careers and employers.
And employers and us alums of these programs know the difference is marginal.
The "NYU/USC is a party school" trope is from back in the 1990s (aka 2 generations ago).
And across time you have to adjust acceptance rates for the fact they are all way lower now because kids send out 2-3x as many apps.
A lot of kids even 20 years ago were applying to schools in NYC/Boston/DC on east coast because they wanted to be in NYC/Boston/DC. Many of my friends went to said schools for psychology/film/etc type programs at schools that as an engineering major were decidedly for me "safety schools". Many of these were 50% admit then and 10% admit now. I don't think they suddenly became as difficult as MIT.
Meanwhile many engineering schools (the types with Institute in the name) that were in cold rural boring areas had higher acceptance rates than my "safety schools" in Boston.
This trend has seemingly only accelerated. For example picking 3 schools in Boston to isolate just the difficulty feature:
* In 2005 MIT acceptance was ~16% vs 4% now (1/4).
* BC was ~30% vs 15% now (1/2).
* BU was ~68% vs 11% now (1/6).
So theres an argument that the harder the school the less dramatically its acceptance rate has compressed, while desirable good but not super hard schools (which have fluffy majors available) have had a larger effect.
They don't make great labor. They are normal labor with egos until the age of ~25. Then they become normal labor without egos as the system killed their ego.
I really expected some secret sauce in Ivys/UoM, and nope. Electrical Engineers there didn't know how to figure out mass of a part given density(based on material) and volume.
The secret sauce seems to be that many come from money, which means they have connections.
Universities have caught on to this trend, and use other heuristics for acceptance like "has this person ever emailed us or visited the campus?" and not just taking applications as the only input. So acceptance rates have started to reflect this. Sorting through 1000's of throw away applications to find those who might actually want to attend.