A Sad Collapse in Student Preparation at UC San Diego Was Inevitable

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When professors at one of the nation’s top public universities start warning that their students can’t do middle-school math or write a coherent paragraph, the rest of us should pay attention. A new faculty report from the University of California–San Diego describes a “steep decline in the academic preparation” of entering freshmen.

Between 2020 and 2025, the number of UCSD students whose math skills fall below middle-school level increased nearly thirtyfold—from under 1 percent to roughly one in eight. The university has been forced to redesign remedial math to cover elementary-school material and create an entirely new course to reteach high-school algebra and geometry.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but…what did you expect?

Every force in American education has been working toward this moment. Covid was catastrophic, but the rot began long before. The UCSD report attributes the collapse to “the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on education, the elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation, and the expansion of admissions from under-resourced high schools.” That last phrase is a euphemism for low-income, minority youths whose interest K–12 education’s love affair with “equity” is intended to serve. But the report exposes how intellectually bankrupt that impulse has become—as if we can get students to and through an elite university by force of will and noble sentiment rather than the hard, cumulative work of academic preparation.

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