What happens when even college students can’t do math anymore?
For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment. Schools across the country have been lowering standards and removing penalties for failure. The results are coming into focus.
Five years ago, about 30 incoming freshmen at UC San Diego arrived with math skills below high-school level. Now, according to a recent report from UC San Diego faculty and administrators, that number is more than 900—and most of those students don’t fully meet middle-school math standards. Many students struggle with fractions and simple algebra problems. Last year, the university, which admits fewer than 30 percent of undergraduate applicants, launched a remedial-math course that focuses entirely on concepts taught in elementary and middle school. (According to the report, more than 60 percent of students who took the previous version of the course couldn’t divide a fraction by two.) One of the course’s tutors noted that students faced more issues with “logical thinking” than with math facts per se. They didn’t know how to begin solving word problems.
The university’s problems are extreme, but they are not unique. Over the past five years, all of the other University of California campuses, including UC Berkeley and UCLA, have seen the number of first-years who are unprepared for precalculus double or triple. George Mason University, in Virginia, revamped its remedial-math summer program in 2023 after students began arriving at their calculus course unable to do algebra, the math-department chair, Maria Emelianenko, told me.
“We call it quantitative literacy, just knowing which fraction is larger or smaller, that the slope is positive when it is going up,” Janine Wilson, the chair of the undergraduate economics program at UC Davis, told me. “Things like that are just kind of in our bones when we are college ready. We are just seeing many folks without that capability.”
Part of what’s happening here is that as more students choose STEM majors, more of them are being funneled into introductory math courses during their freshman year. But the national trend is very clear: America’s students are getting much worse at math. The decline started about a decade ago and sharply accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic. The average eighth grader’s math skills, which rose steadily from 1990 to 2013, are now a full school year behind where they were in 2013, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold standard for tracking academic achievement. Students in the bottom tenth percentile have fallen even further behind. Only the top 10 percent have recovered to 2013 levels.
On the one hand, this means that math scores are close to where they were in the 1970s—hardly the Dark Ages. On the other hand, losing 50 years’ worth of math-education progress is a clear disaster. How did this happen? One theory is that the attention-shredding influence of phones and social media is to blame. The dip in math scores coincides with the widespread adoption of smartphones; by 2015, nearly three-quarters of high-school-aged kids had access to one. A related possibility is that technology is making students complacent. Emelianenko told me that students “are just not engaged in math classes anymore”; they seem to believe that they don’t need to learn math, because they can use AI instead.
Or maybe students have stopped achieving in math because schools have stopped demanding it of them. During the George W. Bush administration, federal policy emphasized accountability for public schools. Schools that saw poor performance on standardized tests received increased funding at first, but if scores still didn’t improve, they had their funding pulled. Research suggests that this helped improve math outcomes, particularly for poor Black students. After 2015, however, the federal government backed off from its accountability measures, which had faced bipartisan criticism. (Some teachers’ unions and progressive parents wanted less emphasis on standardized tests, and some conservative politicians wanted the federal government to remove itself from education policy.) Many schools across the country have shifted toward making math engaging for students at the expense of evidence-based teaching practices. And due to funding shortages or misguided efforts to improve equity, many students are held back from taking the hardest math courses.
The pandemic supercharged the decline. Districts that spent most of the 2020–21 school year mandating remote learning saw students fall more than half a grade behind in math; districts that reopened earlier saw more modest declines. These difficulties prompted teachers to further relax their standards. “Everyone was just exhausted and challenged by the circumstances around the pandemic,” Joshua Goodman, a Boston University professor of economics and education, told me. “And I think one of the reactions to that was for everyone involved to say: ‘Let’s lower our expectations. Let’s make sure that we don’t fail students when they’re not doing their work, because the world is challenging right now.’” Many districts adopted a “no zeros” policy, forcing teachers to pass students who had little command of the material. One study of public-school students across Washington State found that almost none received an F in spring 2020, while the share of students who received A’s skyrocketed. Math grades have remained elevated in the years since.
Together, these changes meant that even as students’ math preparation was stagnating, their grades were going up. The UC San Diego report notes that more than a quarter of the students who placed into the elementary- and middle-school-level remedial course last year had earned straight A’s in their high-school math classes. Almost all of them had taken advanced math courses in high school.
At the same time, the UC system eliminated its best tool for assessing students’ academic preparedness. In 2020, system leaders voted to phase standardized-test scores out of admissions decisions. They argued that the tests worsened racial divides and unfairly privileged wealthy students. But SAT and ACT scores are the most reliable predictors of a student’s math ability, the report found. “It’s not really surprising, then, that you’re going to be admitting more students who aren’t ready for mathematics, because you removed the one piece of data that would have told you that,” Morgan Polikoff, an education professor at the University of Southern California, told me. That same year, the UC system dramatically increased the number of students it enrolled from under-resourced high schools. These students are much more likely to place into Math 2, the elementary- and middle-school-level remedial course.
The new report calls on the UC system to consider reinstating the use of standardized-test scores in admissions, and for UC San Diego to bring its enrollment of students from under-resourced schools back in line with that of other selective UC colleges. “Admitting large numbers of students who are profoundly underprepared risks harming the very students we hope to support, by setting them up for failure,” the report observes.
Bringing back standardized-test scores might help elite institutions get out of the remedial-math business, but it will not address the underlying problem of widespread innumeracy. “Regardless of what a university is doing in terms of its admissions process, American students have been getting weaker in terms of their math skills for about the past decade,” Goodman told me. Already, researchers predict a massive economic cost from declining quantitative skills.
Dan Goldhaber, the director of the Center for Education Data & Research at the University of Washington, told me that he doesn’t know of anyone who denies that young people are much worse at math than they used to be. Instead, most of the arguments for optimism hinge on the idea that students might no longer need foundational math skills, because they could use AI instead—an idea he thinks is absurd.
The other academics I spoke with tended to agree. “Who is going to trust somebody who got a degree in airline engineering who doesn’t know how to think through a problem without a computer telling them the answer?” Brian Conrad, a Stanford math professor, told me. “The premise that foundational ideas don’t need to be learned anymore is a recipe for idiocracy.”
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Comments
By juancn 2025-11-1915:10 > “Who is going to trust somebody who got a degree in airline engineering who doesn’t know how to think through a problem without a computer telling them the answer?”
Years ago when I was working in education (Canadian public schools) our school board had a conference ahead of the school year. The keynote was an inclusive-ed researcher / consultant / speaker who told an anecdote of how they had successfully lobbied for a student with a substantive intellectual disability to be registered for the high school physics courses.
Part of the anecdote was pushback from the physics head: "I've known Jake for years. Great kid. But what is he supposed to get out of physics class?"
The consultant's in-anecdote response: "what is anybody supposed to get out of physics class?"
Wild laughter and applause.
---
A surprising number of people in education seem to simply not know that there is substantive and consequential content in the curriculum.
Having never really learned math, they've never really used it. Having never used it, they don't recognize its utility.
They seem to earnestly believe that it isn't an actual tool but a gatekeeping mechanism devised by autistic persons to humiliate normies.
By franktankbank 2025-11-201:30 Alternative anecdote. I was a students physics TA which involved lecturing and labs and lots of homeworks and in class work. I had a student who really never seemed to understand algebra and he came and said he couldn't really understand how to do the physics problems very well. I said well its going to be hard without really getting your algebra issues figured out and so he just went and did that. I think having a solid understanding of where it is deeply useful (and math and physics have evolved together forever) can be the spark that lights the fire to build the missing understanding. I can say math was very rote for me until I got into physics and I would never have gotten into hairy math without a physics motivation.
Having learned math a lot in university, it is mostly useless knowledge outside of academia. Some basic calculus and logic is useful for sure, but overall, 98% of the math is needed just to be able to learn other math topics later.
By mangodrunk 2025-11-212:241 reply As someone who loves math, I do think math education would benefit from making the primary focus be probability and statistics for high school. In addition, financial math instead of algebra. I would replace trigonometry and geometry with discrete math as electives. And have calculus as another elective but taught without a focus on calculation.
By s1mplicissimus 2025-11-2414:24 As someone who went to economics school and had roundabout the math curriculum you suggested, I think it was a terrible idea. It leaves one with the wrong idea that math is mostly about handling money. Only later, when I got to study math for the computer science degree, I realized that financial math is only a small part of this marvelous huge pie of knowledge.
By progbits 2025-11-1923:06
By IAmBroom 2025-11-1916:32 The anecdote I heard was a grade-school teacher admitting they had never used the Pythagorean formula IRL.
Well, no fucking shit, Sherlock! You aren't the sort of person to turn to math to solve problems. You're the sort of homesy chuckle-cluck who puts up inspirational posters on your bedroom wall.
OTOH, I've been on my back in an attic with a house builder, and calculated the 3-dimensional length of the bizarre edges of a skylight (where the ceiling opening was completely skew to the roof opening). We absolutely used math to solve the problem.
That grade school teacher? They wouldn't have been asked to check the calculations. The carpenter? Used math IRL.
A degree from Ryanair university with major in how to screw your customers while keeping flights fully booked.
By red-iron-pine 2025-11-2016:44 there are definitely accountants with a lot of number skills working hard on screwing flights up -- unironically lots of math in those fields. mostly excel-based tho.
To be fair no one ever takes a moment to show you what the math is useful for. You're just expected to learn it because it's said to be important.
By triceratops 2025-11-1916:461 reply Word. I got taught matrix multiplication in high school without any context. "Here's a grid of numbers kid. Go do some elementary school arithmetic on all of them. No it's not Sudoku I promise".
If only I'd know how important matrix multiplication would turn out to be...
By mna_ 2025-11-209:12 Funny thing is you can use Linear Algebra to solve Sudoku puzzles.
By xboxnolifes 2025-11-1918:401 reply I'm not sure why this is down-voted. Nearly every single teacher I had from elementary though high school, when asked what was the usefulness of the math lesson, said that we would need it when we got to the next level of education. Elementary teachers said we would need it in middle school. Middle school teachers said we would need it in high school. High school teachers said we would need it in college. By college you learned to stop asking questions.
I'm lucky I enjoyed math and science, but I'm not surprised that people who don't enjoy it think it isn't going to be useful to them. It's very much one of the things that if you don't know how to apply it, you won't find the places to apply it, so you end up thinking it has no use.
I think the GP post might have been downvoted because "what the math is useful for" frames it in the wrong way, making it sound like every lesson needs to be immediately applicable to your everyday life. An honest answer might be "this lesson in fractions is one step on a difficult 15-year journey that culminates in a junior developer position at OpenAI," but most 10-year-olds aren't ready for that conversation, so "just trust me, bro" might be the best we can do at that point.
By nicbou 2025-11-229:30 The math I was taught had a lot of practical applications. Fractions for cooking, calculating tips, finance, taxes, etc. Not even that was justified to us, let alone the more advanced stuff.
By xboxnolifes 2025-11-207:00 That doesn't sound like it's framed in the wrong way. It sounds like people don't have a good answer for it, get frustrated, and fall back on a "because I said so" answer.
By vacuity 2025-11-1921:54 Percentages and arithmetic in daily life, programming, financial bookkeeping...to be fair, the math I use often is pretty basic, but even so, the report from UCSD seems to be saying that a significant fraction of the remedial math students can't even perform at that level.
Other math I use rarely, but I'm still glad I learned, say, geometry or calculus when a situation pops up.
By HaZeust 2025-11-204:38 Completely fair point. If I knew the importance of buying a house and how in reach it's always been for me with FHA loans, perhaps I would have taken budgeting classes more seriously. If I knew about the option of putting in some sweat equity for a new DIY kitchen countertop in that house I'd eventually come to buy, perhaps I would have paid more attention to the Pythagorean theorem to know how to cut the corner-piece. So on, and so forth.
>They seem to earnestly believe that it isn't an actual tool but a gatekeeping mechanism devised by autistic persons to humiliate normies.
it should be that, though.
By Joel_Mckay 2025-11-1915:24 A learned language is often lost without regular repetitive practice. People often either become overly specialized in some area, or end up teaching basic-theory while regretting their life choices.
In time, most figure out people create pet mathematical fictions regardless of background, and while authoritative confident liars often allow people to feel better about uncertainty... it adds little value in the long-term. =3
The UCSD report shows some of the questions they asked incoming students.
39% got this right:
34% got this right:Round the number 374518 to the nearest 100
2% got this right:Find 13/16 ÷ 2.
https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio... page 49If a=-2 and b=-3, evaluate ab² - a/bTo clarify, these are percentages for the sample of students taking the remedial Math 2 class, not generally. Two percent is still crazy low though, that's practically nothing.
By nohuck13 2025-11-1918:45 A yep that's a critical piece of information.
For context, "In the 2025 incoming class, this group constitutes roughly one-eighth of our entire entering cohort."
By vacuity 2025-11-1921:57 I did fall for it just now, but I think it's typically easier to read when handwritten.
By chneu 2025-11-1918:37 A shocking number of Americans are also functionally illiterate. I think 21% or about 41 million Muricans.
54% of Americans read below a 6th grade level.
We don't need to know how to do these things when we can just have someone/something do it for us.
