Posted on 12/03/2025 6:29:09 AM PST by DFG
The number of Gen Z college freshmen who are entering universities without high school math skills is skyrocketing — as SAT scores are plummeting, a stunning new report has found.
Even more shocking — many of the students can’t even do middle-school level math, meaning their skills are fifth grade or below.
Experts say this phenomenon, combined with steadily rising high school graduate rates, show that the country is suffering a massive grade inflation problem.
The University of California San Diego, for instance, has reported a staggering 30-fold increase in the number of students unable to do basic arithmetic over the last five years.
“A lot of data in education is subject to manipulation. You can raise graduation rates. You can give a kid a grade he or she may not really have earned,” said Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow and education expert with the American Enterprise Institute.
“You can literally declare a kid a graduate.”
“The incentives are in the system to make ourselves look good,” he told The Post. “High GPA, high graduation rate, etcetera — when it’s a mirage.”
The UC San Diego example is particularly stark. Just 30 of the school’s incoming freshmen had below high school level math skills in 2020. But in 2025 that number rose to 900, the Atlantic reported, citing a shocking November study released by faculty.
That’s one in eight incoming freshmen who are unable to meet basic high school math standards — for a school that takes just 30% of applicants.
All of the students also have to have passing grades in high school math curriculum required by the University of California school system.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
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The K-12 teachers definitely don’t like this - check out the Reddit Teachers forum. It is the administrators who are pushing the kids through, because their jobs depend on increasing the graduation rate.
Time to spend another 3 trillion dollars on the Department of Education - that’ll do the trick!
What’s wrong with this picture?!
In my town of Tacoma, WA, many graduate high school illiterate.
Yes, but they learn that there are 128 genders, so it is all good.
Have you seen what they teach as so called math?
The crap they make you go through to solve the problem 2+2 is unfricking believable!!!!
The parents have to take a class to be able to help their children understand this crap!!!
I’m not making this up!!!
Math is the only thing that is comprised of absolutes.
They are trying to say math is fuzzy logic.
It’s not.
Not just college freshmen. Go to any store where a college student works part time, no matter which year they are in, and is behind the register and pay for something that costs 16 dollars. Give the person a twenty and a single, expecting a 5 dollar bill in return instead of 4 singles. They don’t know what to do. Worse if the register is down for some reason, they have to resort to a calculator on their cell phone because they cannot add or subtract in their heads. A generation of kids who get “indoctrinated” into anti-American beliefs instead of learning what is really necessary in order to support themselves.
> It is the administrators who are pushing the kids through, because their jobs depend on increasing the graduation rate. <
Absolutely correct. Administrators get promotions and bonuses when they increase graduation rates. Same goes when they reduce suspensions - so disruptive students are sent right back to class.
In the district where I taught, school computers were programmed to change any test score less than 50% to 50%.
For example, suppose a student didn’t study at all and got 15% on a test. The teacher entered 15%. The computer instantly changed that grade to 50%.
Public schools are just mass indoctrination centers for pounding anti American and leftist ideologies into our youth.
Education in things that matter aren’t of any importance when you are just breeding future sheep to comply with the system.
> They don’t know what to do. <
In most cases, don’t blame the kids. And don’t blame their math teachers. Blame the idiotic school administrators.
In the district where I taught, calculators HAD to be used in math class for everything. Teachers were no longer permitted to teach skills like estimating, rounding, and adding fractions by hand.
One middle school teacher I know tried to get her students to memorize the times tables. The principal found out, and told her to immediately stop doing that.
Crazy.
Why is anybody surprised? This has been a slow and steady dumbing down process since about 1965.
Why Johnny can’t read, write, do ‘rithmitic or even express himself. Now Johnny has been educated that his/her sex is in question.
In short, we have been purposely ignoring the fact that American leadership in the world is totally dependent on Math skills and not Gender Differentiation.
China, Russia, North Korea, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the Baltic states, East and Western Europe have all grilled their kids in the main disciplines while America has simply kicked the can down the road for 60 years. Add this to the fact that we ushered in Woke, P.C. and Gender agendas that help no student achieve anything except confusion.
The Sciences are the key for any nation and that is why China is surging ahead.
“In most cases, don’t blame the kids. And don’t blame their math teachers. Blame the idiotic school administrators.”
Actually the idiots are the PARENTS that continue to send their kids to the public schools, at least the ones that I work with as they could EASILY not do that.
As to the school administrators, they know EXACTLY what they’re doing - they are far from being ‘idiots’. One clue is that they first stopped colleges from requiring standardized testing, BEFORE putting the final nail into making sure kids no longer learn math.
While it may have started in the 60s, it didn’t gain full force until the Department of Education was created.
One of President Reagan’s missteps was to not get rid of it before it metastasized.
An old friend at one of our once top universities has told me that identity politics and DEI political correctness has done enormous damage to the quality of the students being admitted
White men are virtually outlawed and they make up less than 9 percent of the incoming freshmen class.
The SAT test has been abolished for admissions and , based on performance, some of the DEI admits are functioning at a sub 1000 level SAT score - despite a 4.0 + GPA on their applications
These low functioning admits gravitate to the ethic and woman’s studies programs where they are taught that the reason they can’t make it in mainstream classes is because of racial and gender discrimination.
They survive because they get straight A grades in their identity politics and related curriculum and pretty much use AI to cheat their way through the tough core curriculum classes . This has actually been going on for some time but it has really gotten out of control since the obsession with DEI and the abolition of concrete admission standards.
The last few incoming freshman classes since the abolition of SAT scores and other objective entrance exams have been such disasters that the university is being forced to reinstate the SAT for admissions ( as part of it’s “holistic” admission review process) and is going back to its long standing policy of admitting a majority of high achievement students with about 20% DEI admits with SAT scores in the 1100-1200 range
Many of students admitted under the no SAT requirements were literally low functioning morons without the skills once normally associated with your average graduating high school senior
It was that bad
I posted this on a related thread about Harvard-—
“””” 91% of Harvard students graduated with honors in 2001,””””
This reminds me of when I attended my niece’s high school graduation in Colorado in 2009.
There were 200 students in her graduating class and 120 of those students graduated with honors.
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