The University of Michigan Will Cover Freshmen’s First-Semester Grades Starting in 2027. A Democrat-Controlled Board Signed Off.
- ~19,700 LSA undergraduates within the enrollment scope the grade-covering pilot covers, per Inside Higher Ed's reporting — a precise count limited to just the incoming freshman cohort was not independently available — Inside Higher Ed, Aug. 5, 2026
- $376,800,000 in Michigan state appropriations the Ann Arbor campus alone is set to draw for fiscal year 2026-27 — the campus running the pilot — Michigan Advance, Aug. 12, 2026
- $15,600,000,000 University of Michigan's total FY2026 operating budget across its Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint campuses — UM budget reporting, via Michigan Advance
- 6 to 2 the Democrat-to-Republican margin on UM's Board of Regents — a statewide-elected, partisan body, not a governor's appointees — Michigan Board of State Canvassers; UM Board of Regents roster
- 45 Years how long Johns Hopkins University ran an essentially identical grade-covering policy before ending it in 2017, citing delayed development of student study skills — The College Fix; Forbes
Beginning in fall 2027, the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts will stop putting incoming freshmen’s first-semester letter grades on the transcripts that leave the building. Instructors will still assign real grades — A through F — for every class those students take. The university will still use those grades internally: for academic advising, for financial-aid and scholarship eligibility, and for NCAA athletic-eligibility compliance. What disappears is external visibility. The grade will not print on the transcript a graduate-school admissions office or a hiring manager pulls, and it will not count toward the student’s cumulative GPA.
University officials describe the pilot as a mental-health intervention, not a grading giveaway. “We believe that covering grades will help students start strong and curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals,” the university has said, in language repeated across its public statements on the policy. LSA spokesperson Chris Sebastian (no party affiliation on record — university spokesperson) told reporters the program “is still in its development phase.”
This is not a records fight. UM announced the policy itself, publicly, on its own website, to its own students — there is no denied FOIA request behind this story. The accountability question is different: a taxpayer-funded public research university, governed by a Board of Regents where Democrats hold six of eight seats, is choosing to shield academic performance data from the people who rely on it — employers, graduate schools, scholarship committees — at a campus Michigan taxpayers are funding to the tune of $376,800,000 this fiscal year alone.
The idea did not appear overnight. LSA Dean Rosario Ceballo (no party affiliation on record — appointed administrator) first floated grade covering publicly at her 2025 State of the College address, months before the university formalized it into a pilot program. Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education Angela Dillard (no party affiliation on record — appointed administrator) had already been road-testing the underlying philosophy a year earlier. At a 2024 seminar, Dillard asked the question that now effectively defines the policy: “Why don’t we blow up the transcript?” She framed the goal not as helping individual students improve, but as shifting responsibility outward — placing “blame on institutional systems,” in her words, rather than on the students sitting in the classroom.
“Why don't we blow up the transcript?”
Angela Dillard, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, University of Michigan — 2024 seminar remarks
Mechanically, the pilot is narrower than the framing suggests. Grades are not eliminated — they are covered. A first-year LSA student’s instructor still records a real letter grade every semester, and that grade still feeds the systems that depend on it internally. It is only the external-facing record — the transcript a law school, a medical residency program, or an employer would pull — that goes dark for that first semester, along with the GPA calculation that would otherwise include it. University President Domenico Grasso (no party affiliation on record — appointed, not elected, administrator) has not personally addressed the policy in the coverage reviewed for this piece; it has been carried publicly by Ceballo, Dillard, and Sebastian.
The regents, not the president, are the body ultimately accountable for a policy like this one. Grasso runs day-to-day operations and reports upward. But Michigan’s Board of Regents is not an ordinary university board. Unlike nearly every other flagship public university in the country — where regents or trustees are appointed by a governor — Michigan elects its eight regents directly, statewide, on a partisan ballot, for staggered eight-year terms. That makes party control of the board a documented fact, not an inference, and it makes the board — not any one dean or vice president — the body a reader should hold accountable for what the university chooses to fund and permit.
Chair: Michael J. Behm (D)
Vice Chair: Carl J. Meyers (R)
Regents: Mark J. Bernstein (D), Paul W. Brown (D), Katherine E. White (D), Jordan B. Acker (D), Denise Ilitch (D), and Sarah Hubbard (R).
Net: six Democrats, two Republicans — a majority large enough to set university policy on issues like this one without a single Republican vote.
The board Democrats control by a 6-to-2 margin approves the budget the grade-covering pilot will operate inside of. The University of Michigan’s combined FY2026 operating budget across its Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint campuses runs to $15,600,000,000. The Ann Arbor campus alone — the one running the pilot — is set to draw $376,800,000 in state appropriations for fiscal year 2026-27, money approved by the Michigan Legislature and, ultimately, answerable to the regents who oversee how the campus spends it. The pilot itself is scoped to LSA’s undergraduate population, which Inside Higher Ed put at roughly 19,700 students in its report — though a precise count limited only to the incoming freshman cohort the covering applies to was not independently available at publication.
Michigan is not the first elite university to try this, and the most direct precedent argues against it. Johns Hopkins University ran an essentially identical grade-covering policy for 45 years before ending it in 2017. Deans Beverly Wendland and Ed Schlesinger killed it after concluding it produced the opposite of its intended effect, citing evidence that it “delay[ed] development of study skills and adaptation to college-level work.” A separate, earlier study at Wellesley College in 2014 found a similar covering policy reduced first-semester grades by 0.13 points — a result the researchers read as evidence of decreased student effort, not decreased student stress.
Manhattan Institute researcher Neetu Arnold, who has reviewed internal University of Michigan documents referencing DFW rates — the share of students who drop, fail, or withdraw from a course — and “credit gap” disparities tied to unequal access to AP credit on arrival, argues the policy treats a symptom rather than the disease. The gap Michigan is papering over, in her assessment, is “an attempt to address preparation gaps that could have been identified had Michigan required standardized tests in admissions.”
Michigan excluding first-semester grades is part of a larger problem: 'As universities admit more students who fall below college readiness standards, some departments have used these gaps to justify adopting easier grading practices in the name of equity…'
None of that evidence is in dispute in the way an indictment or a court finding would be — this is peer research and expert opinion, weighed against a policy announcement, not a legal proceeding. But it is documented, published, and directly on point: two prior attempts at the same fix, at two different universities, produced results the schools themselves later characterized as backfiring.
Opposition has come from outside critics and at least one candidate for the university’s own governing board. Republican regent candidate Michael Schostak, per The College Fix, tied the policy to a broader complaint about academic standards: “The announcement follows rampant grade inflation and the dumbing down of higher education, which devalues a college degree. But hiding grades and removing the word ‘fail’ is not the way to do it.” John J. Miller, a Hillsdale College professor, Michigan alumnus, and founder of The College Fix, was blunter: “What we have here is a crisis of coddling.”
Psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert made a related point to Fox News, arguing the policy sends the wrong message to exactly the students it claims to protect: “We’re raising a generation of students to believe that discomfort is dangerous. It isn’t. College should be one of the places where young people discover that they’re tougher than they think.”
“Faculty are under immense pressure from above and below…they don't want students to feel bad about college and leave.”
Hollis Robbins, Special Advisor for Humanities, University of Utah
Not every outside voice reads the policy as pure coddling. Robbins’s read points the finger at institutional incentives rather than at students themselves — a version of the same “institutional systems” language Dillard used to justify the policy, arriving at a very different verdict about who it actually protects.
Starting fall 2027, the University of Michigan’s LSA will keep grading freshmen internally but hide their first-semester letter grades from external transcripts and GPA calculations, at an institution drawing $376,800,000 in state appropriations this year alone. The Board of Regents that oversees this decision is one of the few statewide-elected, partisan university boards in the country — and Democrats control it 6 to 2. The university frames the policy as a mental-health measure; the closest precedent, a 45-year-old Johns Hopkins policy ended in 2017, and a 2014 Wellesley study, both found the opposite result: less effort, not less stress. Republican regent candidate Michael Schostak and Hillsdale’s John J. Miller have criticized the policy publicly; Manhattan Institute researcher Neetu Arnold ties it to admissions standards Michigan has chosen not to tighten.
