Reading, writing, arithmetic: the crisis coverage never leaves the three Rs. But the list is a reduction. The old core of schooling put logic at its gateway, and the slogan dropped it. Reasoning has no score, so it can have no crisis, so it is never deliberately taught. And AI just made the other three nearly free.
Michigan is one of the best universities in the country, and it answered a student distress problem by covering first-semester grades. The number its administrators were looking at is true, excellent, and aggregated at exactly the level where the actual problem disappears. This is how capable people miss a root cause, and it is the same error the college-ROI research made for twenty years.
Juniors learned the trade by doing the grunt work next to seniors. AI is cutting the grunt work and remote work is cutting the proximity, so the apprenticeship that quietly made partners is breaking, with nothing designed to replace it. Who becomes the next partner?
Michigan covered its grades and the internet answered in a day. Some replies were careful, most were not, and nobody could tell them apart. That is a market failure with a Nobel Prize behind it. It explains why good arguments go unread, why I chose to argue without standing anyway, and what anyone with an audience can do about it in about a minute.
Michigan will stop recording first-semester grades to help students explore and to curb a mental health crisis. The pressure is real. The evidence says grading is not what made it, and the university kept the measure for itself.
Bryan Walsh’s Vox piece says college is still worth it, and he is right that the panic is overblown. But his “yes” leans hardest on one number, the Fed’s 12.5 percent, which is the return for the students who finish. Count everyone who starts and the honest answer is not yes or no. It is that “is college worth it” is the wrong question.