This piece in The Atlantic attracted a lot of attention and commentary recently: Rose Horowitch, “‘A Recipe for Idiocracy’: What happens when even college students can’t do math anymore?” (Nov. 19, 2025):
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.
That article reports on this study.
From the study itself, here is a key passage from the Executive Summary :
Over the past five years, UC San Diego has experienced a steep decline in the academic preparation of its entering first-year students — particularly in mathematics, but also in writing and language skills. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of students whose math skills fall below middle-school level increased nearly thirtyfold, reaching roughly one in eight members of the entering cohort. This deterioration coincided with 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. The combination of these factors has produced an incoming class increasingly unprepared for the quantitative and analytical rigor expected at UC San Diego.
The Senate–Administration Working Group on Admissions (SAWG) concludes that this trend poses serious challenges both to student success and to the university’s instructional mission. Admitting large numbers of underprepared students risks harming those students and straining
limited instructional resources. The report offers a series of recommendations to improve the alignment between admissions practices, student readiness, and available support systems.
