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A shocking new internal report from the University of California, San Diego lays bare a crisis that should alarm every parent and taxpayer: in just five years the number of freshmen whose math skills fall below middle-school level has exploded nearly thirtyfold, now affecting roughly one in eight incoming students. This is not a local fluke — it’s a brutal snapshot of what happens when standards are tossed aside and virtue signaling replaces accountability at the gates of our best institutions.
Professors found students arriving with polished transcripts and 4.0s who cannot round a number or solve a simple addition problem, forcing UCSD to create brand-new remedial classes that teach elementary and middle-school math. The report’s placement testing found jaw-dropping gaps: many so-called college-ready students flunk arithmetic most elementary schoolers master years earlier. The mismatch between paper credentials and real skills is a scandal; a diploma now too often covers for a catastrophic failure of basic instruction.
What caused it is no mystery: remote learning chaos during COVID, exploded grade inflation, the elimination of standardized testing as a reliable gatekeeper, and aggressive recruitment from under-resourced schools combined to flood UCSD with students who aren’t prepared for college-level work. Administrators even warn that admitting too many profoundly underprepared students risks harming the very students the university claims to be helping and will strain instructional resources to the breaking point. This is the predictable result when ideology trumps common sense in admissions policy.
Conservative Americans have been saying this for years: tests and standards matter. Getting rid of SAT and ACT requirements and then bragging about “access” while sending students into classrooms unequipped to learn is not compassion — it’s malpractice. If universities want genuine equity, they should restore objective measures of readiness and stop rewarding inflated transcripts that hide a child’s true preparation.
The practical fallout is chilling: majors that demand quantitative thinking — engineering, economics, the hard sciences — suffer when incoming students lack basic numeracy, and taxpayers who fund higher education get less return on their investment. UCSD’s creation of Math 2 and Math 3B to backfill elementary through high-school gaps is a patch, not a solution; patches cost money, lower standards, and ultimately produce graduates who are less competitive in the workforce. The university itself warned that continued downshifting of admissions standards risks long-term damage to student outcomes and institutional quality.
Hardworking Americans deserve universities that teach, not hand out participation trophies. It’s time for policymakers, trustees, and parents to demand real accountability: bring back meaningful assessments, stop disguising failure as “access,” and prioritize rigorous K–12 basics so kids arrive ready to learn. Anything less is a betrayal of the next generation and of the country those institutions pretend to serve.
