UC San Diego’s own faculty report shows a thirtyfold jump since 2020 in freshmen arriving with math skills below the middle-school level, raising concerns about admissions practices and student readiness.

A new report from UC San Diego’s Academic Senate highlights something incredibly concerning about the state of higher education: the share of incoming freshmen who test below middle-school math standards has increased nearly thirtyfold in five years. The document (PDF File) describes an admissions system strained by policy shifts, pandemic education losses, grade inflation, and a widening gap between transcripts and actual skills. The findings are not coming from critics outside the institution. They are the university’s own.

And they point to a glaring problem at the heart of California’s public higher education system: more students are paying university-level tuition for instruction that veers closer to elementary school material. At the same time, academically stronger applicants (many of whom could have enrolled ready for college-level work) were likely turned away during a year of record demand.

Math 2, the university’s longstanding remedial course, was originally designed to address gaps from Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II - content California high schools must provide. But instructors during the 2023-24 academic year reported something new: many students could not perform skills typically taught in elementary and early middle school. In response, faculty redesigned Math 2 in 2024 to cover material aligned with grades 1 through 8 (yes, elementary and middle school level) and created an additional course, Math 3B, to catch-up missing high school topics.