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Comment by randusername | Hacker News Reader

This is a bewildering article and discussion.

Grades and academic performance are outcomes. They're indirect stressors at best; why would one generation suddenly be unable to cope?

The real story is what has changed to increase the stakes of grades. I suspect freshmen are taking out historic debt to contend with food, housing, and tuition costs meanwhile the entry-level job market is extraordinarily competitive. There is no room for error.

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My personal opinion is that grades are one aspect of a filter that decides which college and subsequently which network a certain individual will have access to. It has a high correlation with intelligence but not linked via causation.

Every generation has struggled with it, except now it’s discussed heavily on social media and other forums. Hence the impression that it’s unique to this generation.

Are there challenges today that didn’t exist for previous generations? Yes! Are they more complex compared to what the previous generations faced? No!

Money is the easy excuse.

The root of the problem is that many of them simply are not ready for college for a variety of reasons from parent coddling to defunded primary schools to the reduced ability to think abstractly and with foresight due to the lack of long-form reading.

I know on HN, every reflex is to blame money in one form or another. But there's plenty of blame to go around.

To me, "defunded primary schools" and "lack of long form reading" sound like the same problem. And yes, money would solve it. Whatever. Another $5B to Israel!

Famously places like china/india/japan/etc have extremely traumatic final exams. There was just an article about suicides from some kind of (indian?) final exam screw up.

It doesn't take much of a logical leap to associate it with the pressure put on the children taking the tests.

Presumably that kind of pressure ia coming to america.

children?

Showing my age here, I guess. Fifty years ago, 18-year-olds in college were referred to as "men" and "women."

You must've heard the viral claims that the brain doesn't fully develop until 26?

Nevermind that actual findings like https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/02/260218031606.h... and https://scitechdaily.com/your-brain-doesnt-magically-finish-... say something completely different.

Though auto-insurance claims do show some truth to late teens and early twenties drivers being...not mentally ready.

50 years ago a lot of people were called a lot of things.

As a society we haven't really figured out how to talk about periods of life when there's more than "child" and "adult".

It is, of course, simpler and easier to just draw some arbitrary lines and treat everyone the same but I'm unconvinced that simpler and easier is the right metric here.

American culture incorporates a sense of institutional nihilism that India and China do not have (at a large scale). As globalism winds down and population contraction starts to take hold, it seems far more likely to me that the resulting labor dynamics will end up killing the post-war approach to higher education, particularly as white collar jobs end up constituting less of the economy.

is one generation suddenly unable to cope or did we just recognize that this has been a long-standing source of stress and maladaptive behavior and finally decide to do something about it?

At Berkeley and maybe the other UCs, your first-year grades matter even more than later ones if they determine whether you get into a major. So the overall acceptance rate is higher than schools of similar prestige, but that's because the competitive majors/schools have a higher bar to clear. There are some less competitive alternatives that nerf class signup priorities, like Cognitive Science.

I wonder if U of M is similar. But then they wouldn't be able to ignore grades.

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