The University of California, San Diego’s Senate–Administration Workgroup on Admissions (SAWG) recently published a report revealing large gaps in college students’ math proficiency.
UCSD faculty found that incoming college freshmen’s need for remedial math courses increased a staggering thirtyfold in the last five years—jumping from as few as one in 200 in 2020 to as much as one in eight in 2025.
While remedial college instruction is typically designed to fill knowledge gaps from high school, UCSD instructors discovered that most students enrolled in remedial courses struggled with the most basic math, forcing the Mathematics Department to rework courses from scratch to “focus entirely on elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects,” from as early as first grade.
The report attributes college students’ innumeracy to a range of factors, including “the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on education, the elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation … the expansion of admissions from underresourced high schools,” and the pervasive use of artificial intelligence. National Association of Scholars Director of Research David Randall has pointed to another contributing cause: educators themselves. He argues that many teachers lack sufficient subject-matter knowledge, leaving them ill-equipped to teach foundational skills.
Whatever the root cause(s), universities are not equipped to undertake the reteaching of thousands of incoming college freshmen in elementary-level fractions and division.
“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 SAWD report acknowledged. “Especially now, when our resources become more constrained, we cannot take on more remedial education than we can responsibly and effectively deliver.”
These severe gaps have led even esteemed Ivy League institutions like Harvard to introduce remedial math courses—an outcome that followed the adoption of test-optional admissions during the COVID-19 pandemic, a policy Harvard has since abandoned.
For those in tune with the deteriorating state of K-12 public schools in the United States, this should come as little surprise.
The Nation’s Report Card (NAEP), a national metric of student literacy and numeracy at key benchmarks, has tracked steady declines in math and reading scores for years. According to the latest NAEP report, only 22 percent of high school seniors performed at grade level in math.
The persistence of these declines has prompted no shortage of proposed remedies. The most common explanation, however, is that public education suffers from a lack of funding—an argument that fits poorly with what can be observed.
Consider Pennsylvania. The state already spends more than $37 billion annually on public schools—over $22,000 per student—placing it among the highest spenders in the nation. Yet, according to the latest U.S. Department of Education data, 69 percent of Pennsylvania eighth-graders are not proficient in math, and an equal share cannot read at grade level. These outcomes persist despite a $4.1 billion increase in state education spending over the past four years. Similarly, in Illinois, only one in four eleventh-graders meets grade-level math expectations on the ACT—even after state officials lowered proficiency benchmarks—while Chicago Public Schools carries nearly $10 billion in debt, or $28,000 per student.
The Department of Education itself has spent trillions of dollars since its inception, yet the United States currently ranks 28th in math proficiency among 37 developed countries.
“UCSD is in some ways the canary in the coal mine,” said Akos Rona-Tas, co-chair of the SAWD workgroup and sociology professor, in that it reveals the results of continued systemic failure to educate children at the most basic levels.
The importance of basic numeracy extends beyond college admissions and even future professional careers. As Rona-Tas later noted, “Teaching math is not just teaching numbers. It is also teaching how to think.” And the reality is, the education system has failed to do both.
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