{"id":52885,"date":"2025-11-14T11:34:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-14T11:34:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/52885\/"},"modified":"2025-11-14T11:34:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-14T11:34:11","slug":"college-kids-math-skills-worse-than-ever-blame-pass-the-buck-schools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/52885\/","title":{"rendered":"College kids’ math skills worse than ever \u2014 blame pass-the-buck schools"},"content":{"rendered":"

What happens when a child is promoted, grade by grade, through America\u2019s K-12 school system but can\u2019t actually perform at grade level<\/a> in reading, writing or math?<\/p>\n

As the University of California at San Diego found, they get into college \u2014 and become someone else\u2019s problem.<\/p>\n

UC San Diego\u2019s Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions released a startling report last week documenting a steep decline in college preparedness.<\/p>\n

Between 2020 and 2025, it found, the number of freshmen with math skills below middle-school level \u201cincreased nearly thirtyfold\u201d \u2014 with about one in eight of them unable to handle even the most basic high-school math.<\/p>\n

The university has had to add a new course devoted exclusively to teaching \u201celementary and middle school Common Core math subjects (grades 1-8)\u201d \u2014 in addition to the remedial math classes it already had in place covering high-school topics like algebra and geometry.<\/p>\n

But by the time these kids arrived on San Diego\u2019s campus, they had already been failed many times over<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\t\t\tMore From\t\t\t\t\t\t\tKarol Markowicz<\/p>\n

How does any child graduate from high school not knowing how to do basic math?<\/p>\n

How basic? In 2023, 13% of students who took a UC San Diego math assessment could not perform at first-grade level, and 25% of kids got the equation 7 + 2 = [ ] + 6 wrong.<\/p>\n

This is terrifying \u2014 and the worst part is how inevitable the collapse has been.<\/p>\n

Every year we watch as teachers\u2019 unions get more powerful, test scores decline<\/a>, and our states shovel more and more money into failed schools.<\/p>\n

The majority of kids attending UC San Diego are from California, where spending increased<\/a> by more than 10% from 2022 to 2023 \u2014 to nearly $19,000 per student.<\/p>\n

Yet these kids are failing, and no one is held accountable.<\/p>\n

Teachers\u2019 unions rabidly oppose mandatory standardized testing \u2014 because once it\u2019s clear that their members are falling down on the job, someone is going to want answers.<\/p>\n

An 18-year-old can only hide an inability do first-grade math through 11 further years of schooling if no mandatory testing is in place to catch and correct the problem.<\/p>\n

Without that yardstick, the report found, UC San Diego relied more heavily on high-school grades to make admissions decisions, even though a California Board of Regents task force had documented a \u201cworrisome trend of grade inflation in many schools.\u201d<\/p>\n

With no state tests as a backstop, teachers let students\u2019 grades balloon<\/a> to make it seem like everything was going swimmingly \u2014 when in fact, kids were drowning.<\/p>\n

But the University of California system deserves its own share of blame for admitting students who are utterly unprepared to take on college-level work.<\/p>\n

In 2021 UC San Diego, along with the rest of the state\u2019s university system and many other colleges across the country, stopped requiring SAT or ACT scores for admission, citing a need for \u201cequity\u201d amid the COVID pandemic.<\/p>\n

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This was a giant error, as Harvard University found<\/a>: In 2024, it too had to add a remedial class for incoming freshmen who lacked \u201cfoundational skills\u201d in basic high-school math, after admitting them without a standardized measure of their readiness for college.<\/p>\n

Harvard has since reversed itself on the SAT requirement, noting that new research \u201cconfirms the role of standardized testing to help predict college and post-college success for students.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not that we really needed new research to confirm it, but good to see this elite institution wake up to reality.<\/p>\n

Now the debate over H-1B visas<\/a> is spotlighting the consequences of America\u2019s dire education problem.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump heatedly told Fox News interviewer Laura Ingraham that this country doesn\u2019t have enough talented people to fill specialized jobs \u2014 and therefore must import them.<\/p>\n

Of course America has talented people \u2014 but as we see in San Diego, our schools are consistently failing to educate them.<\/p>\n

And everyone involved just gets a pass.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a national humiliation: UC San Diego is one of the highest-ranked public universities in the country, No. 6 in that category in the US News and World Report college rankings.<\/p>\n

If one of our top schools is seeing this lack of preparedness among its students, of course other countries are going to outflank us.<\/p>\n

Solving this will take a concerted national effort.<\/p>\n

America\u2019s public schools must go back to basics <\/a>and teach reading, writing and math with time-tested methods proven to work \u2014 while pushing aside the teachers\u2019 unions and their irresponsible demands.<\/p>\n

The last piece of the puzzle is school choice: Parents must have a path out of failing school systems<\/a> \u2014 and the taxpayers\u2019 money should follow the student.<\/p>\n

UC San Diego bravely told the truth about how American public education is failing. The rot it has exposed must motivate real change.<\/p>\n

Karol Markowicz is the host of the \u201cKarol Markowicz Show\u201d and \u201cNormally\u201d podcasts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What happens when a child is promoted, grade by grade, through America\u2019s K-12 school system but can\u2019t actually…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":52886,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[2011,4228,15,13894,975,22334,74,76,75,33433,33434,2012],"class_list":["post-52885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-college-admissions","tag-colleges-and-universities","tag-education","tag-mathematics","tag-opinion","tag-public-schools","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news","tag-standardized-testing","tag-teachers-union","tag-university-of-california"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52885\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}