At a time when business leaders across the country are saying they can’t find enough qualified workers to compete internationally, a recent report from the University of California San Diego that shows many students at the top-tier public university can’t do elementary school math is alarming. The report lists COVID-19 shutdowns as a leading cause of the decline in student ability, but the rot goes much deeper and should sound an alarm that extensive reforms are needed.
The UC San Diego Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions Final Report found that the share of students performing below middle-school math levels has exploded, rising nearly thirtyfold, from less than 1% in 2020 to about 1 in 8 by 2025. To underscore how alarming this is: 25% of students could not correctly solve the equation 7 + 2 = [ ] + 6.
Beyond COVID-19, which played a part, the report points to the elimination of standardized testing, rampant high school grade inflation, and mandated admissions expansions from underrepresented high schools as key drivers of the decline. All these factors clearly contribute to the problem.
Pressured by woke advocacy groups and teachers unions, the UC Board of Regents voted unanimously to eliminate the use of the SAT and ACT standardized tests in May of 2020, and a test-blind policy was implemented the following year. Admissions to the UC system promptly skyrocketed. In theory, each student’s grade point average would ensure that those admitted were qualified, but professors quickly realized that California public schools were giving As and Bs to students who hadn’t mastered the curriculum.
Compounding the problem, in 2016, the UC system began tracking enrollments at each university from so-called Local Control Funding Formula schools. The LCFF designation was created by Democrats in Sacramento as a way to increase “equity” by directing more money to schools where more than 75% of students are either eligible for free lunches or can’t speak English. UC institutions are required to report each year on what they are doing to support LCFF schools, and the number of admissions from those schools has been rising ever since.
There is no evidence that students from LCFF schools with the minimum grade point average required to attend a UC school have a working knowledge of state-mandated education requirements. California does not track how many students who fail to meet grade-level requirements are promoted to the next grade. As a result, teachers have every incentive to pass failing students so they become someone else’s problem the following year. Students from these LCFF schools make up more than half of those in UCSD remedial math courses.
The desire to help students from poor communities is understandable. And, while California should be doing far more to work with the immigration law enforcement to decrease the number of non-English speakers in their schools, once those non-English speakers are there, everything should be done to help assimilate them. But waving failing students through the system and granting them admission to California’s top universities isn’t the answer. As the faculty senate report notes, “Admitting large numbers of underprepared students risks harming those students and straining limited instructional resources.” In other words, allowing unqualified students into class is harming the education of everyone in the school.
California is hardly alone. Harvard University abandoned the SAT and ACT but reinstated them after an influx of students requiring remedial instruction in “foundational skills” made the consequences impossible to ignore.
EDITORIAL: NEWSOM PUSHES CALIFORNIA CLIMATE COLONIALISM IN BRAZIL
Critics of the Mississippi Miracle in K-12 literacy often attack the state for holding back students who can’t read. But that is what other states, especially California, should be doing. Even if the results are racially imbalanced, pretending students can read and do math when they can’t, hurts everyone.
If higher education is to recover, restoring standards is essential. Test-blind admissions, inflated grades, and social promotion satisfy the woke constituencies of the Democratic Party, but they leave students unprepared and universities overwhelmed. The UC report is a warning: abandon the war on standards or watch America’s colleges and global competitiveness collapse.
