Above is the full report: Saw this posted around social media, so I just wanted to post here and see how others feel about it.
Thereâs a lot to unpack in that report, and in general regarding the state of education in the US.
I expect that 1 in 8 number who need remedial math at UCSD is below average for four year colleges. Past studies have shown anywhere from 25-40% of four year students take at least one remedial course in college (across subjects, not just math.) Those numbers are higher for students in community colleges of course.
In the big picture, it is the responsibility/charter of public colleges to educate and graduate in-state residents. Because the state of K-12 education has changed dramatically in the last five years, obviously this will impact colleges. It is the collegesâ responsibility to adapt to these changes.
It seems UCSDâs recommendation is to simply not admit students who need Math 2 or 3 by changing holistic admissions processes, requiring standardized test scores, and admitting LCCF+ students more inline with âsimilarly selective UCâsâ. This statement shows where UCSDâs leadership is at, and I couldnât disagree more that this should be a goal:
1. Reduce Math 2 Enrollment to Near Zero The ultimate target should be to bring Math 2 enrollment close to zero. The Enrollment Management group should work with the Committee on Admissions (CoA) to develop an admissions algorithm that integrates the Holistic Review score, Math Index, and other relevant factors to achieve this goal.
Itâs not ideal that colleges (whether 2 or 4 year) have to provide remedial courses, but if not the colleges, what are the alternatives? UT Austin with their top 5% admission rule (and other Texas four year publics) take this responsibility seriously and offer a comprehensive set of remedial classes, to take one example.
Bringing back standardized testing and changing the holistic review process isnât going to magically swap out 12% of the enrollees at UCSD (or whatever the total proportion is who need any remedial classes that UCSD doesnât want to serve anymore.) I would tell them to wake up and do their jobs given the current profile of students who are graduating from California high schools, the students that are their responsibility to educate.
Itâs K-12 education that needs fixing and many many colleges are struggling with the downstream effects of subpar K-12 education. UCSD is not unique in this regard.
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I 100% agree that it is the state university systemâs duty to educate the in-state college students who still need remedial math. Iâm less convinced that this should be happening at UCSD, one of the top academic universities in the entire U.S. Itâs okay to have different colleges with different missions serving different populations. And itâs okay for the state of California to say that a few of their schools like Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSD will serve the top academically performing students in the state/country, while other colleges in their state system will offer remedial courses.
Grade inflation is astronomical at this point - at least from what I have personally observed in multiple contexts. It is not uncommon for fairly mediocre students to have perfect GPAâs, but earn mediocre standardized test scores and AP scores. If UCSD admissions is hamstrung in only being able to consider applicantsâ GPAâs there is no way to distinguish truly top academically performing students from mediocre academic students. (Note that I say âmediocre academic students,â as these students may be wildly talented and wonderful in other areas of their lives.) I think it makes sense to reinstate rigorous academic standards for at least a few of the UC schools, UCSD among them.
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I respect that opinion but IMO the California public college system should be working together to solve how best to educate the populaceâŠUCSD seems to be going rogue. Again, I would use UT Austin which has to admit the top 5% of students from every public HS in the state as an example of best demonstrated practice here. And many of those students UT Austin has to accept are woefully underprepared for college.
UCSD is talking about switching out at least 12% of their enrolleesâŠhow should they begin to do that? The set of applicants is the set of applicants, they have some subset of those graduating from California HSs each year to choose from (I canât imagine many of the OOS or international enrollees are those who need remedial classes.)
Admissions has already been working on attracting top applicants, and then working to get the top applicants to yield (in-state yield was about 25% for class of 2029âŠwhy are they losing 75% of the applicants they accept?) I am sure some improvements can be made across those efforts, but I doubt they would reach the impact the UCSD senate seems to be advocating for. Where are the students who they would rather have applying and/or attending now? (IMO the answer is NOT Berkeley or UCLA)
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I donât think there is a shortage of highly academically achieving in-state students who would gladly accept admission to UCSD. The problem is that as it is now, it is difficult to distinguish themselves from mediocre academic students. So a hypothetical in-state kid with a 4.0, great ECâs and recommendations, a 1240 SAT, and 3âs on her AP exams looks identical to another in-state kid with a 4.0, great ECâs and recommendations, a 1600 SAT, and all 5âs on her AP exams. There is a huge academic quality difference between these two students but they look nearly identical to UCSD admissions officers. So Student 1 is accepted and Student 2 is rejected. And, in fact, Student 2 doesnât receive the results she wanted from any of her hoped for in-state schools for the same reason. So she ends up choosing to go to U. Texas, UMich, U.Washington, or another of her out of state acceptances that could see how academically strong she was because they could confirm her grades with her test scores. I suspect that when UCSD starts using test scores again, there will be a grand reshuffling of in-state students where students like Student 1 will simply go to a slightly lower ranked in-state option and students like Student 2 will choose UCSD instead of having to travel out of state. As I said in my first sentence, I certainly donât think there will be a shortage of highly qualified in-state students accepting spots at UCSD.
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Do you have data that support these statementsâŠthat admissions is accepting students who are less talented than those they reject (at a meaningful level)? And remember, it is holistic admissions, not just based on academic achievements.
And again, just to put numbers around this, if you are talking about switching out 12% of the class that required remedial math (about 675 for class of 2029 and ignoring those who required remedial classes in other subjects,) at a 25% yield that means 2700 students were âwronglyâ accepted. Without supporting data, I have a hard time believing that.
I donât always share that I work in admissions reading apps every day, but I assure you it is not difficult to parse through academic qualifications without test scores.
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No, I do not have data supporting these statements (or data refuting them either). Just anecdotal observations as someone very adjacent to elite college admissions. Yes, I know you work in admissions from reading your prior posts, and I suspect I know where (although not sure).
Every spring on CC we see whole threads devoted to anguished California families of top academic in-state students who were shut out of all the top UC schools. Frequently, these students have been accepted to top OOS schools (that could see their test scores), but those OOS options are unaffordable⊠or if they are affordable, the students choose to attend one of the OOS options. You just donât see this level of confusion from families of top students coming out of other states. You donât, for example, see repeated stories every year of highly academically qualified Michigan high school students being gobsmacked because they were shut out of UMich, UMich-Flint, MSU, and EMU (but possibly being accepted to Wisconsin and Northwestern). The reason why is that it doesnât happen. The state of Michiganâs college system is doing a much better (I.e. more predictable) job of âsortingâ its in-state students than California.
So, yes, without evidence, I do believe that the top California schools are rejecting highly qualified in-state applicants in favor of less qualified applicants, some of whom even need remedial math. This points to a matching problem. I guess you could blame the matching problem on something other than test blind admissions, such as holistic admissions, but Occamâs razor would suggest otherwise. I have a really hard time believing that 12% of UCSDâs students needing remedial math points to the optimal admissions formula.
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I do understand your points above. This last sentence gets at the crux of the issue thoughâŠespecially if one believes the data that 25%-40% of all four year college students need at least one remedial class. So in comparison, UCSD is well below that. I donât have time to find recent data on this, one of the most cited reports is from NCES from 2016.
For UCSD, the most pertinent data would be what proportion of graduating HS students are at the pre-calc level, as determined by incoming testing (the level UCSD wants.) I donât have that data either, but expect itâs out there somewhere.
I agree that the instate universities have an obligation to help bridge the gap. And itâs not just a CA problem, itâs nation wide.
In Indiana, Purdue started public charter high school to get kids college ready while still in HS. They also have an âearly startâ program for students who need to get caught up in math before the start of freshman year.
Even back in my day, Cornell would give conditional acceptances with the agreement that students come to campus the summer before, take specific classes, and pass.
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I have a vague recollection of California frequently monkeying around with its math path through middle school in ways that stirred controversy.
A quick look back finds, for example, CA Dept. of Education opposes HS calculus? - Parents Forum - College Confidential Forums though Iâm not sure this is what Iâm remembering. Something about math instruction itself.
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The report does say that Berkeley âhad previously been unique among the UC campuses in not offering any course below calculus until last yearâ, which is not true (UCB offered Math 32 precalculus for years/decades).
The reportâs Table 2 does indicate that a non-trivial number of entering UCSD frosh who completed precalculus or calculus in high school were tested to place in to Math 2 (the lowest level math course).
Regarding students who need precalculus math, note that Harvard offers Math Ma-Mb (calculus with precalculus), and Princeton offers MAT 100 (precalculus), and they have offered them for years, so students needing math remediation despite âfour years of high school mathâ (which ordinarily means reaching precalculus at the minimum in high school) are found all over the college admission selectivity spectrum.
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Princeton and Harvard can spend their resources any way that they (Provost, Trustees, President, etc) deem appropriate.
The question is should a public university be offering remedial classes- when those classes are already offered in a robust community college system. I canât speak to California- but in New York, the notion that the universities in the CCNY system have to offer remediation when the identical classes are available at community colleges across the state is absurd. Not a good use of public money. You need to hire adjunctsâ with a PhDâ to teach HS classes at a four year university? How does this make sense?
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Remedial math at UCSD is not referring to Precalculus. It is referring to math skills below precalculus, sometimes far below. From the report:
âIn Fall 2022, the number of students placed into Math 2 [remedial math] grew to nearly 400, and by Fall 2023, placements into Math 2 increased to nearly 500 students. The Mathematics Department was caught by surprise and scrambled to find additional instructors quickly for Fall 2023. Ultimately, the Mathematics Department could only serve 480 students from the larger pool that needed to take a course remediating math knowledge in order to enter our earliest college-level math courses (Math 3C or 4C). Alarmingly, the instructors running the 2023-2024 Math 2 courses observed a marked change in the skill gaps compared to prior years. While Math 2 was designed in 2016 to remediate missing high school math knowledge, now most students had knowledge gaps that went back much further, to middle and even elementary school. To address the large number of underprepared students, the Mathematics Department redesigned Math 2 for Fall 2024 to focus entirely on elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects (grades 1-8), and introduced a new course, Math 3B, so as to cover missing high-school common core math subjects (Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II or Math I, II, III; grades 9-11).â
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Iâm going to debate just one small point here:
Per ACT: a score of 22 is predictive of a student being college math ready ( ACT Test - Scores - Higher Education Professionals | ACT )
Per SAT we are only looking at a math of 530 to be college math ready: Benchmarks â SAT Suite | College Board
Based on that - your 1240 student would do just fine 
ETA: I have seen 24 used as a âSTEM readyâ number (sorry donât have the source yet) - but thatâs still fairly middling regarding scores
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Also - from my personal experience as faculty - so completely antidotal (and basically worth what antidotal stories are worth -nothing âhaha) â- the one student I advised who needed remedial math was actually quite bright (low ACT score in math though) â> he just went to a very small rural school where the preparation was terrible. He got through the TWO remedial math classes he needed with As and then did perfectly well on the courses required for the major. He ended up being accepted into multiple competitive professional programs.
I suppose you can debate all you want whether this specific kid belongs in a competitive school -but given the right resources - he excelled. We know that high ACT/SAT scores are correlated with high income â so who are we really eliminating with stringent test score standards? Iâd be be so bold as to suggest that we donât need a class full of students with 1500+ or 31+. That lower (middling) scores still indicate readiness.
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My point in context was not that the hypothetical student earning a 1240 SAT score would necessarily need remedial math; it was that she may be admitted over a far more academically qualified applicant due to the UC test blind policy.
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I love that Texas offers admission to the top 5% of every high school. Bright and hardworking students shouldnât be penalized for attending low-resource districts (which often goes along with poverty/low resources at home, too.)
That said, why should UT-Austin be providing remedial education? Itâs a waste of resources. I also suspect it results in poorly-prepared students ending up choosing less demanding majors in order to graduate on time.
Why not instead have a policy that says to the top 5% of all high schools âCongrats, you are accepted to UT Austin! First, you have to demonstrate college readiness, either by standardized tests scores, or by passing our own readiness tests, or by passing remedial classes. Remedial classes will be taught by excellent teachers, and will be available at a CC near you. They are free. Congrats again, and your slot at UT-Austin will be waiting for you when you are ready.â
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excellent idea!
Obviously this is more than UCSD can fix, but to me one big issue that needs to be addressed is the quality of math education in elementary, middle, and high schools throughout the USA.
I was a math major in university. It always seemed to me that one big reason that I was a math major was that I loved it and was good at it. However a major reason why I liked math was that I had a very, very good math teacher for at least two years of high school. He really helped me to improve my understanding of math and to see the beauty in math. Part of the issue here is that this one very good high school math teacher was himself very good at math.
I have mentioned other times that of the various math majors who I knew in university, we went into a very, very wide range of careers. There are lots and lots of things that you can do with a degree in math. To a large extent this is based on the fact that there are a huge range of things that work in todayâs world only because someone did the math. However, of this huge range of careers that the math majors who I knew went into, teaching was not one of them. No one I knew as a math major in university ever mentioned nor as far as I know even thought about becoming a teacher.
Perhaps if we found a way to get people who love math and who are good at it to think about becoming teachers, we might eventually end up with more students who are good at mathematics.
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Oh how I wish this were the case.
I was a terrible math student K-12. And as a result, had terrible math teachers. My schools all had fantastic math teachers- who taught the advanced kids who already loved math and were good at math.
But I didnât realize this until my OWN kids started school. They were good at math. Things âclickedâ for them without even having them explained. And so they had fantastic math teachers. Teachers who had them building things out of gumdrops and marshmallows and using a stock market challenge in middle schoolâ with algebraic formulae years before theyâd be actually taking a class called âalgebraâ. And so kids who were wired to like math became kids who LOVED math. My 10 year old explaining how bond market prices worked. My 11 year old showing me how to calculate which is better- a fixed rate or variable rate mortgage, and how to pay down a mortgage early the right way and not the more expensive way. And a 7 year old explaining Fibonacci numbers to me as I put some artichokes into a pot.
Would be great if folks who loved math became math teachers! And the mediocre math teachers now in classrooms could teach what they are actually good at instead of being shoved into a math classroom and told âWe just lost a math teacher so youâre taking this overâ.
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