Today’s Fail-Safe Students

At home for winter break two and a half years ago, Coleman Fitch got a letter from the College of Wooster, where he was a junior. His performance, he knew, reflected his efforts: inadequate. Once he had a test on a Thursday morning; the night before, he went out partying till 4 a.m., slept for an hour, then got up and crammed until he had to show up for the exam at 9.

Mr. Fitch, thinking back, smiles mischievously. “Things like that definitely occurred from time to time,” he says.

That fall semester, however, had been almost a complete disaster. He’d failed two courses in geology, his major. He figured he was in trouble but expected academic probation.

The letter said he had failed out. “I was just in shock,” says Mr. Fitch. “I waited till after the holidays to tell my parents.”

The Fitches — a doctor and a social worker, both Wooster alumni — were angrier with the college than at their son. They set up a meeting with the president, dean of academic engagement, and dean of students. Geology professors protested, but Wooster readmitted Mr. Fitch immediately.

At that, jaded readers — professors sick of entitled students, administrators hounded by hovering parents — might be rolling their eyes. They’ve seen this before: the upper-class kid whose mom and dad swoop in to save him from self-defeat. Failures come in different forms. Screwing up a project or test. Blowing an interview or deadline. Getting kicked out. In whatever way, failing is supposed to lead to some reckoning or comeuppance.

We often think of failure as a defining moment, because it makes us question our assumptions, and it tests our resolve. In science, it’s the null result that prompts researchers to rethink a hypothesis. In literature, it’s the darkest stage in the hero’s journey that leads to a transformation. In life, it’s the letdown, the breakup, the fiasco that separates those who give up from those who get back up.

But how to fail isn’t always a lesson today’s students are learning. Instead, they are insulated from it.

This is, some say, a generation raised on grade inflation and approbation, lavished with medals for just showing up. A generation bred by so-called helicopter, snowplow, and stealth-fighter parents who intervene to keep them from being cut from the team, overlooked for a summer job, or ignored by an inattentive teacher.

“They haven’t been permitted to fail,” says Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and one of the authors of Generation on a Tightrope: A Portrait of Today’s College Student. These young adults are heading into a world of rapid change: To survive, they’ll have to reinvent themselves after an employer or a career dissolves; to innovate, they’ll have to take chances on new ideas.

“These students are going to live through the second digital revolution, and they are not ready for it,” says Mr. Levine. “This is a high-risk world. The notion of building in opportunities for failure is really important.” If young people don’t experience meaningful failure in school or college, they’re bound to face it in adulthood, where it could paralyze or derail them.

Or perhaps the world is just too high risk, and failure really isn’t an option. Maybe the Fitches were right to rescue their son.

As the employment market gets more competitive and the middle class erodes, the savviest parents and students feel like any failure — to get into the right college, make good grades, land a coveted internship or job — is a setback on the road to a decent salary and secure life. As society cuts its safety nets, families have to make their own.

But not everyone has the support or resources to get another shot. For people with little money, failure is more perilous. A slip-up can lead to a free fall.

Experiencing some degree of failure might be an essential step toward growth and maturity. But to talk about it that way may be a luxury. It’s a privilege to fail and recover.

Most students who struggle at Wooster end up meeting Pamela Rose. In 25 years, Ms. Rose, director of the learning center, has seen some confounding changes in them.

“Many have seldom been required to really figure things out on their own,” she says. “They are followed by parents and coaches and teachers who want them to be successful, so therefore they are.” She sees little truly independent work, she says, or responsibility.

Academic monitoring may go back to grade school. In many districts, parents can log in to a website to check their child’s grade at any moment in any subject, how she did on a test that day, what score he received on the last assignment. In the old days, Ms. Rose says, parents might not even have known a kid had a test coming up. If they did, and asked how it went, the child had choices: Tell the truth, or — if the test had gone badly — lie and scramble to fix it before the end of the semester. Whatever the pitfalls, brushes with failure helped teach individual decision making.

Now, with the ubiquitous contact that technology enables, students are never far from a parent who can check in on an outline, a draft, a term paper. When Ms. Rose talks to students having trouble with a writing assignment, she suggests visiting the college’s writing center. Their replies sometimes stun her. “They say: ‘Oh, no. I just need to make sure that I have enough time to send it to my parents,’” she says. “That they tell me that they are sending it to their parents — wow, that is weird. Who ends up writing the paper?”

At Stanford University, Julie Lythcott-Haims watched parents try to construct a path to success. From 1998 to 2012, in part as dean of freshman and undergraduate advising, she increasingly saw students with parents in tow, parents in touch, making decisions, making demands — all to protect their kids from the knocks that ostensibly come with adulthood. It was encroachment, she says, and it diminished young men and women’s “wherewithal to be a college student.”

Ms. Lythcott-Haims presents a theory for how all this mollycoddling evolved in a new book, How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success, starting with four trends in the early 1980s. First came “stranger danger,” with high-profile kidnappings and children’s faces on milk cartons. Then a federal commission published A Nation at Risk, which declared that American schools were falling behind other countries’ and led to more emphasis on testing. The self-esteem movement also took hold, and, with more mothers working, so did the “playdate,” scheduled, monitored social time among children.

The result, says Ms. Lythcott-Haims, is young adults who haven’t encountered obstacles quite the same way previous generations did. “What I saw was many college students who didn’t seem to have ever experienced much failure, actual failure,” she says. “My sense is that, with the best of intentions, parents who are uberinvolved are undercutting their kids’ chances of developing self-efficacy.” She cringes to think of some of them in the workplace. Employers already gripe that millennials need constant praise, can’t work independently, and avoid risk.

Anthony P. Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, doesn’t buy that origin story. Parents’ protection of delicate students comes from economic uncertainty, he says, a fundamental fact of American life for the past 35 years.

“Risk is what has changed,” Mr. Carnevale says. “Risk is very high.”

If parents shield children from challenges, that’s a rational response to tougher circumstances. People no longer enter an industry and work their way up; now they have to brand themselves and chart their own course. College is more expensive, putting more focus on the return on investment. Failing out can be a serious financial blow.

Mr. Carnevale and Ms. Lythcott-Haims agree on one thing: The tendency to insulate young people from failure is a higher-income phenomenon. “Winning begets winning,” Mr. Carnevale says.

Many students at elite colleges are already winners, and they and their parents want to keep it that way. So the experience of failure can be strange — and skewed. At the Johns Hopkins University, students frequently show up at the counseling center despondent, saying they’re failing. Matthew Torres, the center’s interim director, has learned to ask what “failing” means, exactly.

“‘I have a 3.8,’ they’ll say with shame,” Mr. Torres says. “The standards are so high for these students that failure means anything but absolute success.” He asks them to talk about another time they failed and how they got through it. There isn’t another time, the students reply. They have never failed at anything.

“They have not learned the lessons of failure,” Mr. Torres says, “and they have not developed resilience.”

For that reason, some elite institutions — Brown, Cornell, Duke, Princeton, and Stanford Universities, among others — have started projects to cultivate resilience. Harvard’s Bureau of Study Counsel runs the Success-Failure Project, which is designed to give students an opportunity to talk not just about coping with failure, but also the burdens of success.

“Persistence in the face of success is just as difficult a thing to sort out as persistence in the face of failure,” says Abigail Lipson, director of the bureau. On the project’s website is a video of Conan O’Brien, a Harvard alumnus, speaking to graduates in 2000, detailing the menial jobs he held after graduation, the television gigs he’d been fired from, the blistering reviews he’d received. Although each failure stung, he says, it was also liberating.

“Your biggest liability ... is your need to succeed,” he says. “Success is a lot like a bright white tuxedo. You feel great when you get it, but you are desperately afraid of getting it dirty, of spoiling it in any way.”

When failure is foreign, kids don’t learn how to stumble and recover. But where failure hangs in the air, where it’s not the exception but the expectation, young people can struggle to find solid footing.

Baltimore City Community College is just across a park and an expressway from Johns Hopkins, near neighborhoods hit by the riots in April, but it’s another world for students and families. They see failure in schools, in boarded-up houses, in junkies on the street. Most students here are trying to make ends meet; some are homeless.

“At Hopkins, they are trying to figure out, How am I going to get my child to sustain the lifestyle that we have become accustomed to?” says Ronald H. Smith, vice-president for student affairs. “At BCCC, it’s about survival. How do I get my kid to survive and, if we’re really lucky, get out of these conditions that we’re in?” Mr. Smith doesn’t see many helicopter parents, but lots of “frightened parents” — mothers, mainly, who are afraid that the street will lure their sons away from college.

One of those students, Solomon Williams, is trying to beat the odds. “I started off failing,” he says.

Mr. Williams spent his teenage years in and out of the juvenile system and didn’t graduate from high school. At age 19, he realized he was on the wrong path. He took the GED test at BCCC, scored very high, and enrolled there on a scholarship that covered tuition, fees, and books. He became president of the history club and the Student Government Association.

To stay focused, he says, “you have to have tunnel vision.” He is sitting in a car on North Avenue, the east-to-west vein that runs through some of the most blighted neighborhoods in Baltimore, looking out the window. “You have to ignore the things around you.”

But it isn’t so easy. Mr. Williams tried to stay away from settings that might lead to trouble, he says, but a year and a half ago, during winter break, he decided to unwind at a party. A fight broke out, and two people were stabbed. Mr. Williams says he wasn’t involved, but people pointed to him as the unfamiliar guy there. Police issued a warrant for his arrest.

Figuring his record would damn him, he left college and went off the radar. “I could have dealt with it the right way,” he says now. “I could have had the right people standing behind me — of course I could, I was the SGA president. But I failed myself.” The cops finally caught up with him in January, a year later.

Before the incident at the party, Mr. Smith, the student-affairs vice president, had driven Mr. Williams home countless times, spent hours counseling him, and even spoken to a judge on his behalf at a probationary hearing. After the student’s yearlong absence and arrest, when he was out on bail, Mr. Smith and other administrators at the college welcomed him back and said they would still honor his scholarship. A court date is set for July, and Mr. Williams is confident he’ll be cleared. He is determined to get back on track, earn a teaching degree, maybe a law degree, and help young people like himself avoid the pitfalls that lead to failure, he says. “I want to stand in the gap, just like BCCC did for me.”

Poverty and his past failures still pursue him, he says, like “a roaring lion.” He is proud to pull up GED.com, where he appears, smiling in a gray suit and striped tie, next to a marketing tag line. “Solomon passed the GED® test and changed his life forever. Now it’s your turn.” But he keeps on his phone a grainy, black-and-white law-enforcement picture of him. “Solomon Williams,” it says. “Attempted Murder.”

“You see what I am up against?” he says.

The community college often acts as a safety net for students. Mr. Smith recalls a student named Norman who, some years ago, said he had to quit college. His family had been evicted, their stuff laid out on the street, and addicts had stolen everything of value. Mr. Smith and his colleagues passed a manila envelope around the office and raised enough money to keep Norman enrolled. He is now six credits shy of a master’s degree at Coppin State University.

Whatever trips students up, Mr. Smith talks about “stopping out,” not “dropping out.” Administrators are reluctant to call any setback a “failure” — or, as one administrator here put it, “the f-word.”

That may sound too soft, too forgiving. But the way people define failures — the stories they create — can shape how they recover and grow, says Sarah Lewis, author of The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery. Ms. Lewis, an assistant professor of the history of art and architecture and African and African-American studies at Harvard University, interviewed more than 150 people for her book: researchers, artists, and businessmen who had faced major setbacks. “Whenever you talk to those who have achieved a pinnacle or become renowned for something and had a failure hit them, they never called that experience a failure,” she says. In fact, if she approached them saying she wanted to talk about their failures, she says, “they often wouldn’t let me interview them.”

That’s in part because “failure,” a term that merely denoted bankruptcy in early 19th-century America, “has never been the appropriate term for the dynamism that can come afterwards,” Ms. Lewis says. The opposite of failure is not “success,” a word that captures a moment in time, she says. It’s “mastery,” which describes a continuous process.

In looking for such commitment, psychologists and educators have increasingly focused on “grit,” a trait, distinct from intrinsic talent or intelligence, that drives someone to make a sustained effort toward a goal.

“If grit truly is the best predictor of achievement in an academic context, it’s important to note that grit can’t be developed from an armchair,” Ms. Lewis says. “You have to actually experience failure.” But how much failure and how we choose to perceive it shapes the future.

Coleman Fitch could have skated through college on middling grades. That’s what he did in high school, where he says he had “tons of resources” for college preparation, which he wasted. “I had the same attitude there,” he says. “Do what I can to pass, and enjoy the other aspects twice as much.”

Failing out of Wooster startled him. “What the hell do I do now?” he remembers thinking. He was embarrassed, and worried about losing relationships — with his friends, his twin brother (also a student at Wooster), his girlfriend. When he got back to Wooster, he went to talk to Ms. Rose, the learning-center director. “He was just angry,” she says. “It took him being withdrawn to get him going.”

Mr. Fitch was determined to prove himself. “That whole situation is, hands down, one of the best things that has ever happened to me,” he says. With the help of Ms. Rose, he worked on time management, doubled down on studying for tests, and put his papers through more-thorough revisions. He quit the lacrosse team, a sport he loved, because it was a distraction. Compared with academics, he says, “it would be a lie to say that those athletes don’t care about the sport more.”

Mr. Fitch also reached out to the professors who had flunked him. Mark A. Wilson was livid when the president let Mr. Fitch back in.

“He’s a geology major with F’s in two major courses, but Mom and Dad come, talk to the president and the dean, and now you’re going to keep him? It seemed outrageous,” Mr. Wilson, a professor in the department, recalls. He angrily told the president he’d share Mr. Fitch’s grade the next semester.

“I kept that promise,” the professor says. Mr. Fitch’s grade? A-minus. The two have since developed a close mentor-student relationship, and Mr. Wilson has come to admire the young man’s tenacity. This spring, Mr. Fitch graduated from Wooster, having worked as a teaching assistant and won a geology-department prize for students who have improved the most and are likely to work in the field.

Despite the padding of Mr. Fitch’s fall, his experience is still in some ways the classic failure story: Student reaches a nadir, has an epiphany, buckles down, and emerges triumphant. These days, though, Mr. Wilson more often sees students who are all but failing — getting straight C’s or D’s — but are unfazed, he says. “Maybe they have always been protected from the consequences.”

Mr. Fitch knows those kids, too. Some of his friends come from privileged backgrounds. All they need to do is graduate, he says, and their parents will find them jobs. One friend in particular was slacking, Mr. Fitch says. “I told him, You’re making the same mistakes I did. You just need to do the work.”

The friend got kicked out of Wooster, but now he’s back, with a new major he thinks will be easier. Mr. Fitch shrugs. His friend is still doing the minimum, he says. “He hasn’t changed at all.”

Scott Carlson is a senior writer who covers the cost and value of college. Email him at scott.carlson@chronicle.com.