A blunt, damning report out of UC San Diego has pulled back the curtain on a crisis that ought to alarm every parent and taxpayer: between 2020 and 2025 the share of incoming freshmen needing remedial math surged nearly thirtyfold, rising to roughly one in eight students. This is not a fluke or a localized hiccup — it is the predictable result of replacing objective standards with wishful thinking and administrative virtue signaling. The university’s own faculty workgroup lays the blame where it belongs: policy choices, pandemic disruption, and runaway grade inflation have combined into a disaster for academic standards.
Even more shocking is the detail: students arriving with 4.0 math GPAs who cannot round numbers or solve an elementary algebraic equation are being funneled into a new remedial class called Math 2, designed to teach middle-school arithmetic. Professors found that many of those in Math 2 scored at levels that should have been handled years earlier, yet their transcripts told a very different story. This mismatch between transcript and true ability exposes what happens when admissions put race, optics, and access theater ahead of honest measures of preparation.
Let’s be clear about causes: COVID devastated learning, but it did not invent this problem. Removing standardized tests as a gatekeeper and leaning heavily on inflated high school GPAs left admissions officers blind to academic truth, and aggressive recruitment from under-resourced districts without matching remedial supports only multiplied the harm. The report warns that admitting large numbers of profoundly underprepared students risks doing more harm than good, and that warning should red-flag every administrator who confused inclusivity slogans for educational policy.
The practical consequences are ugly — higher D, F, and withdrawal rates in gateway STEM courses, few remedial entrants completing engineering majors, and scarce instructional resources stretched even thinner by the need to teach arithmetic to college freshmen. UCSD has even been forced to create placement pathways and additional low-level courses like Math 2 and Math 3B, plus summer testing and place-up exams, just to triage the problem. Those are bandaids on a deeper wound caused by abandoning merit-based assessment and encouraging grade inflation.
Across the country other elite schools are quietly acknowledging what this report screams: you cannot have both lowered gates and the same outcomes. Institutions that flirted with test-optional policies are reconsidering because objective measures actually predict success better than flattering GPAs and polished admissions essays. If conservatives have been warning that dismantling entrance standards would produce academic chaos, this is the empirical confirmation — and it demands a policy reversal, not more hand-wringing.
Now is the moment for parents, legislators, and donors to stop rewarding bureaucratic theater and start demanding accountability. Universities must restore honest, objective measures of readiness, strengthen K–12 fundamentals, and stop pretending that emotional comfort replaces competency. If America wants engineers who can engineer and citizens who can balance a checkbook, we must insist on standards again — no excuses, no appeasement, just a sober commitment to teaching the basics.
