[Worldtraveler once upon a time]

--- "College students are still struggling with basic math. Professors blame the pandemic"

Notice the Associated Press doing the now well-honed "personal story first" opening gambit. Poor Diego Fonseca, "who aced honors physics and computer science in high school...."

That's the whole story. No one "aces" physics and computer science but cannot grasp basic high school level math.

Too bad this Diego wasn't the OTHER Diego Fonseca who did not go through America's crumbling public education system.

"I'm a Phd student of mathematics at Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia) interested in Robust Optimization, Markov decision process, Machine Learning, Neural networks, Stochastic process and Dynamical Systems. I did my undergraduate studies at Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Source: https://math.stackexchange.com/users/165639/diego-fonseca

Ass-ociated Press won't be featuring the OTHER Diego Fonseca, as a 'compare and contrast' article, because.....

[TexasFreeper2009]

Yep, you are correct, this story is complete BS. There is no way to even do calculus without algebra. Nearly every problem in the end comes down to algebra in calculus.

[EEGator]

…it doesn’t fit the narrative.

[Bookshelf]

Our Diego is only nineteen years old and struggling? I suggest he search out a new path.