There have been articles about the competitiveness of elite colleges and universities and the need to provide courses or partial courses or seminars in failure. The idea is legitimizing failure; it happens to everyone after all. But, since some college students have never experienced failure, the colleges need to include instruction on how to fail. Some even provide certificates of failure at the beginning or end of the courses. In this article, Karen Gross explains why certificates of failure are unwelcome recognition since failure is evident in lives being lived, and especially since the focus of certificates of failure applies to such a narrow segment of college students who have been surrounded by failure of every sort from food scarcity, parental absence, incarceration, addiction, and homelessness.