Wow they’re just learning that!
In the year 2000 freshman students in engineering were accepted with little or no algebra at Penn State. In the 70s’s, I had to have the first course of calculus before I walked through the door.
When I went back to college full time in the late 80’s all incoming students were required to take a math competency test. If you got less than 6 right, you were required to take remedial math. An 097 course for most of them, but for those who only got two or three right, it was back to math 094.
And just before that when I was going part time, I took an English writing course. The writing ability of the students even then was mostly appalling.
They now refer to the algebra that students used to learn in middle school as “college algebra”.
How anyone could tackle a college engineering major without having taken algebra in high school is beyond me.