Are you smarter than a 5th grader? Probably not if you’re a University of California San Diego college student.
As I discuss in an upcoming FPM+ Article, college students are routinely taking remedial classes in basic literacy and mathematics. At the University of California San Diego, 1,000 incoming students needed to take remedial math courses. In a remedial class, 1 in 4 could not correctly answer the following math problem.
If you can answer this question, you’re uh overqualified for college.
How bad is it? The dismantling of standards at the high school level was followed by the dismantling of standards at the college level and the result is that no one knows anything.
One in eight UC San Diego freshmen have math skills that fall below high-school level, a 30-fold increase since 2020. One in 12 have math skills below middle-school levels. Yet the average high-school math GPA was an A- for students taking a middle-school remedial course. This suggests rampant grade inflation in high schools. Its effects were exacerbated by the UC Board of Regents move in May 2020 to stop requiring the SAT in the name of making admissions more equitable and improving “educational quality.”
Oh they did. By their standards. The freshmen may not be able to count without using their fingers, or more likely, ChatGPT, but I bet they can correctly identify
1. Systemic racism
2. Fat-shaming
3. Slut-shaming
4. Sexism
5. Genocide in Gaza
6. Islamophobia
And their classes in podcasting (not joking), toxic masculinity (not joking either) and social media branding (see above) have more than prepared them for their emerging careers as podcasters and social media influencers. Or running their accounts.
Declining student preparation appears widespread at the state’s universities: About half of UC campus math chairs say that the “number of first-year students that are unable to start in college-level precalculus”—which used to be a standard course for California’s top high school sophomores—doubled over the last five years. The other half of chairs said the number tripled.
But who’s counting anyway? Not UC San Diego students.
