Now that colleges have morphed from institutions of higher learning to buy-a-diploma mills, colleges are increasingly catering to students’ desires. At many schools now, more than half the students get special accommodations during exams, like having rooms to themselves or extra time. (This is okay for some students, but more than half?).
At any rate, the University of Michigan has joined the ranks of schools that don’t show students their grades awarded during their first semester. (As you’ll see, they do get grades, but they’re secret and used in limited ways).
Click below to read the WSJ article on the deep-sixing of grades, or go here to read an archived version:
An excerpt (indented; my own comments are flush left):
The University of Michigan will drop grades for first-semester freshmen next year in an effort to “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals,” according to the school.
Instead of a letter grade, first-semester transcripts will show “pass or no credit.” The program is designed to help students “acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys,” the school said.
The program, set to start in fall 2027, applies to students in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, which enrolls about half of Michigan’s roughly 8,000 first-year students.
A Michigan spokesman declined to comment about how the university reached the decision to enact the pilot. Although grades won’t be recorded on student transcripts or affect grade-point averages, professors will still assign them internally to track eligibility for scholarships and academic awards.
I’m wondering whether student anxiety will really abate because of this. What happens during the second semester, if you know you passed but don’t know where you stand? If you barely passed during your first semester and get a “pass”, you might want to work harder, but you won’t know where you stood initially in competition with your classmates. Also, the grades do count for scholarship and awards, so they aren’t irrelevant. Will your inability to know your “internal” grades possibly increase anxiety?
And why does the risk of mental problems decrease after the first semester? After all, you’re going to get real, “external” grades from then on.
This tactic is not unique:
Schools including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology have implemented similar “grade-covering” programs in past years.
The shift at Michigan, among the nation’s largest and best-known public universities, comes as schools wrestle with grade inflation and the need for remedial instruction for freshmen ill-prepared for college-level classes. University of California math and science professors have urged UC regents to reinstate entrance exams because so many freshmen were unprepared.
Of course poor preparedness is the fault of secondary schools like high schools, but entrance exams can help. The SATs or equivalent tests are even better, and, in combination with high-school grades, are the best predictor of how well a student does in college—and later life.
But in a perverse move designed to coddle students (they have numerous excuses), many schools no longer require such tests for admission (the University of Chicago makes them optional), or prohibits you from submitting scores at all. This kind of coddling is also instantiated in grade inflation. Harvard has taken ineffectual steps to remedy this, but at least they require SATs or ACTs for admission. Michigan doesn’t.
In May, Harvard University faculty voted to approve a 20% cap on the number of A’s per undergraduate course in an effort to curb grade inflation. It won’t apply to A-minuses, which committee members predicted would become the most awarded grade.
At the University of Michigan, a review by the news site MLive found that 74.1% of all undergraduate grades in 2022 were an A+, A or A-. A decade earlier, that percentage was 57.6%.
Kenneth Lowande, a former Michigan political science professor who left for Rice University, said he didn’t think the new policy would make much of a difference because grade inflation had made grades largely irrelevant. Michigan no longer mandates the SAT or ACT for undergraduate admissions.
“Grades have lost their value as an indication of quality or excellence,” Lowande said.
That’s true if you gauge quality relative to others. If everyone is excellent, of course, grades do indicate quality, but that’s not the case. What we have is an Alice In Wonderland “All Must Have Prizes” mentality based on coddling. And the students love it:
Michigan students lauded the new policy. Student body president Summit Louth said he had spoken to around 50 classmates and they were either happy or jealous the policy didn’t exist when they were freshmen. Poor mental health is closely tied to academic stress and anxiety among students, Louth said.
Louth, 20 years old, said he earned all A’s and one B in his first semester and doubted he would have worked as hard had the classes been pass/fail. But he thinks he would have learned more from his classes without the pressure of earning high marks.
How does Louth know that?
Derek Peterson, a history professor and former chair of the faculty government, said he believes the move is generally beneficial because it will give students a chance to explore subjects more freely.
If that’s the idea, why give grades at all? Why not give written evaluations that can be put in students’ transcripts? That might be difficult for large courses, but several schools, according to Grok, have completely dispensed with letter grades:
Schools That Dispense with (or Heavily Minimize) Traditional Grades. . . . several colleges (mostly small liberal arts institutions) fully or largely replace letter grades with narrative evaluations (detailed written assessments of a student’s performance, strengths, weaknesses, and growth). Examples include:
- Hampshire College — Narrative evaluations only; no letter grades or traditional majors.
- The Evergreen State College — Narrative evaluations; no letter grades or GPAs.
- Alverno College — Ability-based assessment with detailed feedback; no traditional letter grades.
- New College of Florida — Narrative evaluations / performance reviews.
- Antioch College / Antioch University — Narrative evaluations (sometimes alongside or instead of grades).
- Sarah Lawrence College — Strong emphasis on narrative evaluations (letter grades are recorded but secondary).
- St. John’s College — Seminar-based “Don Rag” discussions; letter grades are recorded but available only by request.
Narrative evaluations would seem to be better anyway for small courses, but in light of the difficulty of grad schools or employers reading a bunch of narratives, I still favor traditional grades, but with caps like Harvard’s. If that policy is made public, students can’t beef about it when they arrive.
There comes a time in life when the free rides stop. Employers don’t dispense with evaluation of employees early in their tenure on the grounds of mental health. And college, where you can seek counseling if you’re upset or distressed, is the place for it to start—if you haven’t already gotten grades in high school! This may sound curmudgeonly, but part of the art of living is to realize that you are not the best at everything, and to either accept that or try to better yourself. After all, grades are not the totality of existence.
The wheels are coming off the tricycle, in this as in many areas of our society.
I doubt the students will be unaware of the internal grades. I think the suggestion is to not have them included in the transcript or for GPA calculation. I also think (from my experience of being a student and an instructor) that the anxiety is usually high during the first semester and it usually goes down over time. However, completely disregarding first semester grades does not seem like a good idea! There has to be a better way of supporting students going through anxiety.
May be not all, but many students may actually lose the incentive to work hard knowing that first semester grades won’t matter at all, which then becomes counterproductive for the classes in the following semesters. Also, how do future employers/grad schools compare these students with students from other schools who do not have this luxury? This sounds like the coddling that people like Jonathan Haidt has been talking about for a decade.
🎯
By going with the equity flow, mass ‘higher’ education is digging it’s own grave. What rational employer will give any regard to “qualifications” from such institutions? (Maybe the elimination of most entry level jobs by AI will “solve” this problem.). What students’ parents or other funders will continue to support such a business model?
And whatever happened to the Flynn effect? It seems to have mutated into C. M. Kornbluth’s 1951 sci-fi The Marching Morons.
Curmudgeonly academics of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose which isn’t being lost anyway. (Or maybe “You have nothing to use but your brains”, which rhymes with “chains”.)
Completely agree.
It does seem odd that institutions of learning whose functions include the dissemination of knowledge and credentialing students for future employment should withhold knowledge, however imperfect, from learners of their learning performance, which might make it possible for them to judge whether or not their courses of study and institutions are a good fit for them, and also destroy through grade inflation their usefulness as credentialing institutions for future employers.
Perhaps these institutions with their huge costs should rethink higher education before the public rethinks it for them.
IM(fully ignorant)O: Too many uni employees who do not teach classes are filling their otherwise empty lives with things to do. If everyone were busy with course and lesson plans and grading, perhaps there would not be such reservoirs of mishigas. It appears that perhaps the loss of the indirect costs rake-off from federal STEM research grants is hitting some schools’ non-teaching staff this year.
I am glad I still had grades both for immediate feedback on how I was doing versus how the college expected me to do, and, very importantly I discovered, to drive a conversation with professors in new-to-me disciplines where I had to learn some basic study skills and strategies.
In any case: Harumpff! Harumpf! You kids get off my lawn!
Hmmm … lemmee try this hot take :
Grades suck.
That’s the point.
Embrace the Suck
-Unofficial U. S. Military slang phrase
“Pass or no credit” — now there’s a euphemism for “fail” I hadn’t heard before!
One of my hobbies is WWII cryptography, and I’ve been reading Colossus by Jack Copeland, a collection of short memoirs and essays by people who have researched, or even participated in, the breaking of the “Lorenz” cipher used by the highest echelon of the German military during the war — like orders signed by Hitler himself. This was critically important to the success of the D-Day invasion, and, at least as much as any other factor, saving literally millions of lives which would have been squandered had the invasion been postponed (and I imagine the first atomic bomb would have been dropped on Berlin…). The people who did the work of breaking Lorenz and deciphering the German communications (which was not a single accomplishment, but had to be done daily) were by and large young adults — 18 or 19 or maybe 25 years old — who simply didn’t have time to spare for “personally meaningful academic journeys”. That is what uncoddled young people are capable of!
Oh, and if the Michigan student body president really said students were “jealous” rather then “envious” of the new policy — send him to Remedial English.
He’s probably already in it, so needs to take Remedial Remedial English. 🙁
Its focus next semester is Graphic Novels of the Late 1960s.
Rutgers implemented a grades policy way back in 1970, when I was a freshman. You could see your grades, but your GPA started your second semester. For me, this took some pressure off, but it also taught me a lesson but without penalty. The lesson: you have to study in college to get good grades. In high school I never studied all that much and still received good grades. College taught me a lesson and not having grades count first semester was a benefit to me.
My first year at university was a train wreck. I was not prepared. Like Howard, I had very good grades and didn’t study much in high school. My SAT and ACT scores were in the upper 90’s for percentiles. I’d like to say I quickly learned that I needed to study and not party, but that was not the case. It took me a semester and a half to figure that out, and by then I was on academic probation. Then it took me four and a half years after that to finish up my BSME. I did learn a lot, and went on to complete my Master’s as well. After the first year failure, my GPA was very good. To address the point of the article, my mental health was good, except for a sense of failure after I realized how I had set myself back. There was no anxiety or other issues while I was getting the poor grades, but then again, I was self-medicated quite a bit on the weekends. After that my mental health was actually pretty good as I had renewed focus.
So I’m of two minds on this topic: on one hand, maybe if the first year doesn’t count, then it’s a chance for the student to get used to college life. On the other hand, because of my bad grades, I ended up repeating a couple classes (including Calc 1) – had I not known my grade, I might have taken the next highest course and been poorly prepared to advance beyond that level. Maybe a better solution is to work at a job for a year after high school to gain some maturity.
I earned straight C’s my first semester at UCLA. I immediately learned that I needed to work. Made the Dean’s List every other quarter until I graduated Magna Cum Laude. I am grateful for those C’s, they taught me what college was all about. This Michigan plan is a terrible idea.
My first semester at Claremont Men’s College (too many years ago) I was awarded the grade of “C” in the calculus. I had never received a ‘C’ before. I realized that my public schooling had not trained me how to study and I had not realized it until that cold, wet slap of a college level ‘c’ hit me. Rather than wilt, I doubled down, found a tutor, spent after hours with the professors and changed some bad habits. I did not receive another one. That is supposed to be the lesson, isn’t it?
There is a degree at Oxford for which around 8 or 9 students were admitted per year. After two years, students took three exams, and you either passed and got the degree or failed and got no degree. Some students failed every year, and had spent two years with nothing at the end to show for it. There is a distinguished philosopher who was too frightened to take that degree, and studied instead for a less terrifying degree.
It’s only tangentially related at best, but the column here reminded me of a funny incident from the late 1980s, when I served on our university’s “Presidential Fellows” selection committee, which evaluated applicants who could be awarded an especially prestigious and generous fellowships for graduate work. Our committee was composed of faculty from about a dozen departments, from humanities to hard sciences.
We found that grades – GPAs, etc – were a useful way to make a first pass through a pile of applicants without needing to dig into too many incommensurable variables. Narratives of a student’s performance from colleges that did not use or report grades were trickier, but we managed.
However, there was one applicant who had attended, I think it might have been, Bennington College, from which we had fairly detailed narratives from instructors. One stood out. The student had taken an art class on ceramics, and the instructor wrote that the student’s ceramic pots were so light that they “literally floated off the table.” The physicist on our committee read that out loud, gave a puzzled look, and said “I don’t think so…” It was a wonderfully understated reaction.
Had they been filled with helium?
No need. They were just sealed up after spending time in that intellectual vacuum.
When I was at the State University of New York at Binghamton (1974-1978) the grading system was A, B, C, and NC, where NC meant “No credit.” (There were also pluses and minuses for A, B, and C.) The idea was to encourage students to experiment without fear of failure. The scheme meant that your transcript only showed evidence of your competencies. Your non-competencies (or incompetencies, e.g., failures) were not deemed relevant to those who would eventually review your transcript and were not recorded. Some students who were failing miserably in a course would simply stop going and take the NC, which didn’t show up on the transcript. It all seemed fine to me, as I never took advantage of it, but the university eventually went back to traditional grading.
CWRU had first year pass/fail back in the seventies. The reasoning given was that a first year student was often adjusting to living away from daily parental influence/support for the first time with all the resulting freedoms and responsibilities and a bad or wobbly first year could unfairly influence a GPA. One was still expected to pass. Students more or less knew where they stood based on relative struggles with the material and all the exams still had explicit grades.
One method used for grading first-year courses was to base the grade on a weighted average of several exams. In many cases, the system used was to drop the lowest midterm grade form being included in the overall midterm average, which would be about 50% of the grade, with the other 50% being the final—or some such. In most cases, the dropped grade would be the first midterm, as students who had sailed through high school without doing much work applied the same method to college studies—and received an unhappy surprise on their first exams. This convinced them that they actually had to buckle down, and analysis of the results showed that the system worked, with little correlation of the first midterm grade with the others.
This was in a different age, of course, when grades did mean something, and students’ feelings played no part in the equation.
I suspect that this will be an interesting thread.
I have colleagues who do that where I teach, while I don’t do it myself. I see that policy is especially favored for courses that are filled with pre-med students who see those courses as especially important for proving their case for med school (courses like Human Anatomy, and Physiology of Human Disease). “Pre-med types”, as we call them, include students who can be extremely upset but also pretty vocal about trying to cut a deal after bombing an exam. Realistically, an exam may coincide with other exams on the same day, or maybe there was heavy outside work or other factors where a student just couldn’t be fully prepared. I am agreeable to this policy, although I don’t do it myself.
I had relative success with that policy in one class: there were 3-4 smaller in-class tests during the term with the lowest one not counted, plus a final exam. This saved a lot of my time, not having to deal with with and judge various excuses. “Test early, test often.”
Interesting. Instead of helping students to confront and deal with the stress, pretend that life can be without stress! It is true that the swath of undergraduates we see these days (especially in CCs and public unis) are older, have more family and financial burdens, and a whole lotta junk that makes life harder. Not an excuse for them, but different from what most of us who went on our parents’ dime (okay, thousands) back in the day. One solution is to help students to figure out how to do the work required of them correctly and efficiently. But often, they do not take advantage of the options. One program we used to help underprepared students to succeed added significantly to their grades (and increased retention) for 1st-years, less for 2nd-years, hardly at all after that (we suspected that by the time a student reaches year 3, s/he has probably figured out how to succeed. Of course, it added one more credit to their enrolment, but usually at no additional cost.
FWIW, Hampshire College is now closed. Alverno College was on the verge of collapse a couple of years ago, but got a big infusion to its endowment. Still, SOME of Alverno’s programs and courses use only narrative assessment. When I taught their online courses (undergrad and post-bac) in the early 2020s to fill in for a colleague, students earned letter grades in all the courses I taught. For undergrads, there was also some written narrative assessment. But the idea of no grades is at least not universal there. On the plus side, Alverno does strive to serve its local community of underrepresented demographic groups, low-income, 1st-gen uni students, and so on.
I was writing a response about coddling students, in line with the convo going on here, but I’ve changed my mind to comment that there really are degrees of anxiety out there for students that we did not have. College costs have increased dramatically, and students routinely go into debt from loans with the stress of not knowing if they will one day be able to pay it off. I literally paid for my room and board and much of my tuition (my parents handled the rest) with part time work during the fall and winter, and full time work over the summer. I graduated w/o debt, and that is nearly impossible now. Meanwhile, owing to those costs a higher % of students need to work full time around their class schedules, and I am constantly trying to accommodate that with my students. We had time and financial pressures, but I’m saying that the pressures seem higher now for students. Meanwhile they are aware that they may never be able to buy a house, get a job in their field, and really be able to settle down.
Does that explain the reports of increased anxiety? I don’t know if that is an entire explanation (maybe they really have gotten softer), but I wouldn’t ignore them.
I agree, this has been my experience as well. It’s not uncommon where I taught for students to have a full-time job while trying to take five courses, being the only way they could afford college. Some also had families to support. Often the lack of sleep was evident. They were not partying.
One of my students had a full-time job working a graveyard shift while trying to do classes during the day. He died during the semester. Although I never found out the cause, I have been haunted by likelihood that he was taking amphetamines to stay awake.
The cost of higher ed is indeed the single largest cause of student anxiety and threat to their mental, and likely physical, health.
Leland Vittert, a NewsNation anchor, is autistic. His parents didn’t tell the school system because they wanted him to be treated like any other child. They taught him to adapt to the world as it was; they didn’t attempt instead to change the world to accommodate his neurodiverse perceptions. His school life and interactions with peers and teachers were often hellish and his dad quit his job to be there for his child every minute. His family had to put him back together every night. His dad became his best friend and helped him accomplish the goals he learned to set for himself. It was exceedingly difficult but his family’s approach worked for him. In college he began to put the lessons his father taught him on how to understand and get along with other people into practice. And today, in his early forties, he is married, an author, and an excellent news anchor. His family may have taken the hardest available road to raising a neurodiverse child but he believes it worked for him and gave him the resilience he needed to succeed in life. His story is told in “Born Lucky”.
I wish that folks tasked with educating college students who are anxious about evaluations would consider the value of accomplishment rather than accommodation when designing systems to help those anxious students. Resilience is one of life’s greatest gifts.
But it’s so much easier to lower the ceiling than to raise the floor.
I don’t know the relevance of this story to today’s colleges.
When I was a post-doc, I got a job offer to teach advanced undergrad courses in physiology and neuroscience at LeMoyne-Owen college, one of the system of traditionally Black colleges that were originally established to provide education when many universities did not accept Black students.
I was unsure of what would be expected of me. My post-doc advisor asked me if I knew how to teach these courses at, say, Harvard or UCSD. When I answers in the affirmative, he said “teach it the same way at LeMoyne Owen”. And I did.
These were students who did not expect coddling. They all worked, and many of them worked night shifts at FEDEX, a major employer in town. this meant that some of them fell asleep during the lectures. Every time, they came up after class to apologize, and I told them that I understood, but they were responsible for the exam, and no excuses would be accepted. And these exams were tough. I did not grade on a curve. As expected, a few students just couldn’t cut it, the grades of most followed a skewed Gaussian distribution, with the average at about 82, because of a few students who were simply outstanding. At the time, I thought that this was the way university teaching ought to be-and I still think so. I am still in touch with some of those students, and have many excellent memories of those classes.
One thing left out of this discussion is incentives. As long as state legislatures continue to tie higher education funding of public colleges and universities to enrollment, grade inflation will remain a problem. Expecting professors to fail poor students is expecting them to threaten their own job security. “Retention” and “Persistence” are the euphemistic jargon used by educrats to mean, “Keeping butts in seats” in order to protect annual state funding. Awarding a student low marks means they may not return next semester. That is a problem.
My tertiary education was funded by the ever-suffering British taxpayer. The intake for my degree was about 75 people. We lost about twenty students after the first year. Lost a couple more after the second. If I remember correctly, about 51 got a degree.
The K–12 education system has already been ruined. Now it’s the universities’ turn. Wokeism will not go quietly into the night.
Evergreen State College was a pioneer, perhaps unique among public institutions, in replacing student grades by detailed narrative assessments. I visited Evergreen a couple of times in those better days (40- 50 years ago), and was very impressed by the motivation and sophistication of Biology students there— long before Evergreen declined into capture by the woke performance artists of 2017.
One of my friends studied Native American history and culture at Evergreen in the late seventies or early eighties. Her experience was mostly positive but her profs didn’t always hold students to the required class assignments. A friend in a different program ten or fifteen years later had a similar experience. But both enjoyed the class discussions and the thought provoking writing assignments.
I got my BS at Caltech in 1966, and hiding grades is a very bad idea. Students probably have some idea of how they are performing, but this feedback is helpful as a reality check in deciding if they should change majors, or go to a different school. Changes in California education policies with regard to math offerings and other offerings have unfortunately also resulted in a decrease in the quality of Caltech students.
Whenever I see such stories, I envision bureaucrats who, as parents, diligently drove their little Britannies and Taylors to grade school each day because the bus stop was around the corner out of mommy’s and daddy’s view. The kind of people who call the police when they see an eight-year-old playing at the park without adult supervision. The ones who don’t have children themselves but are confident about how to raise them. The ones who have never had the deep privilege of succeeding at either a physical or intellectual challenge when you wondered with good reason whether you might instead fail. The ones who cannot grasp that character comes in part from facing one’s failures and carrying on despite them.
Excuse me for my cynicism, but Therapeutic USA has long had my head boiling. Maybe I need meds. And a counselor. And fuzzy bunnies. And crayons. And squishy balls.
I’ll settle for another cup of coffee.
Yes, psychoactives are as effective as fluffy bunnies, but they often have unwanted side effects.
The problem, simply defined, is that administration and faculty have different goals. The former is concerned with retention and graduation rates, the latter concerned with imparting knowledge, skills and critical thinking to students. Ideally the two goals should intertwine gracefully, but in practice the first often compromises the second.
To be fair to administrators, they face ever increasing pressure from politicians to produce unrealistic results while having their funding constantly cut.
The politicians in turn have to contend with an electorate that has been led to believe that higher education is a waste of time and money and only produces woke, radically indoctrinated graduates.
So the root of the problem comes down to the forces that have been shaping the anti-intellectual culture that now dominates the US.
It’s as if Richard Hofstadter never won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.” For that matter, Tocqueville and many others had a bit to say about it, too.
I agree with your points about the internal dynamic on campus, but anti-intellectualism among the broader population is practically a founding precept of the United States. What emerged in the mid-20th century and became dominant in our lifetimes is a therapeutic culture in which psychological discomfort of any type is not to be tolerated and must be the fault of someone else, somewhere. And that cultural mindset was and is driven mostly by a subset of those who consider themselves “intellectual.”
Two signs of the therapeutic culture in academia go beyond comedy. One, of course, is student complaint about things that that make them “feel unsafe”. The other, less remarked, is the mysterious growth of offices such as that of Associate Dean for Well-Being. The latter category is apparently meant to coddle the former, including the faculty.
Are “trigger warnings” still a thing?
Well, I wouldn’t mind a little coddling. I might have gotten a little when it came time to do the dean’s and dept chair’s evaluations. And that is another problem, faculty tenure and promotion being highly dependent on student evaluations.
Madness.
When I went to law school, we had two final exams after the first semester. My grades on both were in the C range. I was in shock. I got up my nerve and asked my criminal law professor what I had done wrong and how I could do better. He answered those questions with immense kindness and patience. I realized right away that I had been using test techniques that were great for undergrad but didn’t work for law school. I never got grades that low again, and I graduated in the top 10%. If I hadn’t reached out for that prompt early feedback, I would have kept on going down the wrong road.
Really? The problem was using the wrong “test techniques?” I don’t understand what this means.
In undergrad history and economics, which were my majors, on a final essay exam, it didn’t really matter what position you took on the question; all that mattered was working in a lot of factual information to support your position, to show that you’d remembered the material.
Completely different in law school. You’re supposed to analyze both sides of the question, “on the one hand, on the other hand,” and then to choose the correct side, with reasons given.
And of course, undergrad math and science were also different. They generally had simply right or wrong answers.
Like most curmudgeonly folks here, I think that the coddling of students is a very bad idea. I think that the principal purpose of university is to teach students how to think and familiarize themselves with the intellectual achievements of the past. But there are many who think that the purpose of the university is to prepare students to deal with life, to give them a foundation on which they can support themselves financially. I understand that view. In both cases, coddling students is the wrong way to go. they need to understand that they have to work hard toward their goals, and learn the appropriate lessons from their work. And stress? Hellfire and damnation, life IS stress. Learn to deal with it.
A few folks have made a point in this thread about university costs. I confess to not having thought of that, and I am ashamed. Student debt is horrible, and I do not know how people can deal with the pressure of those debts. I never had to deal with that; My parents paid for the first semester of state university tuition (IIRC about $350) and then, since I was already working in a lab, the university took care of my tuition. (I had not realized that that was part of the deal; nobody told me that my tuition would be waived or that I would be paid. I assumed that they were allowing me to work only because I made myself a pain in the gluteus maximus to the professor, and that the lab experience was my reward. That was correct, but imagine my surprise when I got checks instead of tuition bills.) So I feel bad for the people with university debt. Those sums are so large that working while in college cannot pay them off. And what happens to people who study things out of interest, like science, real literature, real history, etc. Anyone wanting to go into those studies as an academic may never be able to pay off those loans—academic salaries are not high enough. So there are indeed sources of stress to students that I had not considered, and I apologize.