The University of Michigan announced that, as part of a new mental health plan, they will no longer report letter grades on freshman transcripts. The plan is to be put into effect in Fall 2027.
Michigan joins schools such as MIT, Caltech, Swarthmore College, and Wellesley College, which mandate that all first-year students begin under a pass/fail/no record system. Some other schools, such as the University of Washington, offer optional pass/no record status to freshmen. Other schools, including Brown, Yale, UNC, UVA, allow students to designate particular courses to be taken pass/fail, and still more allow for freshmen to select one course per semester to be taken that way.
This move is meant to ease the transition into college and reduce stress, but such a blanket policy could also dampen the ambitions of the incoming class. At a small university where everyone is highly motivated this is not a concern, but larger state institutions have generally avoided this approach until now. We will see how this plays out and if other schools follow suit.