College kids' math skills worse than ever, Newsom run California finds - blame our pass-the-buck public schools

What happens when a child is promoted, grade by grade, through America’s
K-12 school system but can’t actually perform at grade level in reading,
writing or math? 

As the University of California at San Diego found, they get into
college — and become someone else’s problem. 

UC San Diego’s Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions released a
startling report last week documenting a steep decline in college
preparedness. 

Between 2020 and 2025, it found, the number of freshmen with math skills
below middle-school level “increased nearly thirtyfold” — with about one
in eight of them unable to handle even the most basic high school math. 

The university has had to add a new course devoted exclusively to
teaching “elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects (grades
1-8)” — in addition to the remedial math classes it already had in place
covering high school topics like algebra and geometry. 

But by the time these kids arrived on San Diego’s campus, they had
already been failed many times over. 

How does any child graduate from high school not knowing how to do basic
math? 

How basic? In 2023, 13% of students who took a UC San Diego math
assessment could not perform at first-grade level, and 25% of kids got
the equation 7 + 2 = [ ] + 6 wrong. 

This is terrifying — and the worst part is how inevitable the collapse
has been. 

Every year we watch as teachers’ unions get more powerful, test scores
decline, and our states shovel more and more money into failed schools. 

The majority of kids attending UC San Diego are from California, where
spending increased by more than 10% from 2022 to 2023 — to nearly
$19,000 per student. 

Yet these kids are failing, and no one is held accountable.

Teachers’ unions rabidly oppose mandatory standardized testing — because
once it’s clear that their members are falling down on the job, someone
is going to want answers. 

An 18-year-old can only hide an inability do first-grade math through 11
further years of schooling if no mandatory testing is in place to catch
and correct the problem. 

Without that yardstick, the report found, UC San Diego relied more
heavily on high school grades to make admissions decisions, even though
a California Board of Regents task force had documented a “worrisome
trend of grade inflation in many schools.” 

With no state tests as a backstop, teachers let students’ grades balloon
to make it seem like everything was going swimmingly — when in fact,
kids were drowning. 

But the University of California system deserves its own share of blame
for admitting students who are utterly unprepared to take on
college-level work. 

In 2021, UC San Diego, along with the rest of the state’s university
system and many other colleges across the country, stopped requiring SAT
or ACT scores for admission, citing a need for “equity” amid the COVID
pandemic. 

This was a giant error, as Harvard University found: In 2024, it too had
to add a remedial class for incoming freshmen who lacked “foundational
skills” in basic high school math, after admitting them without a
standardized measure of their readiness for college. 

Harvard has since reversed itself on the SAT requirement, noting that
new research “confirms the role of standardized testing to help predict
college and post-college success for students.” 

Not that we really needed new research to confirm it, but good to see
this elite institution wake up to reality. 

Now the debate over H-1B visas is spotlighting the consequences of
America’s dire education problem. 

On Tuesday, President Trump heatedly told Fox News interviewer Laura
Ingraham that this country doesn’t have enough talented people to fill
specialized jobs — and therefore must import them. 

Of course America has talented people — but as we see in San Diego, our
schools are consistently failing to educate them. 

And everyone involved just gets a pass.

It’s a national humiliation: UC San Diego is one of the highest-ranked
public universities in the country, No. 6 in that category in the US
News and World Report college rankings. 

If one of our top schools is seeing this lack of preparedness among its
students, of course other countries are going to outflank us. 

Solving this will take a concerted national effort.

America’s public schools must go back to basics and teach reading,
writing and math with time-tested methods proven to work — while pushing
aside the teachers’ unions and their irresponsible demands. 

The last piece of the puzzle is school choice: Parents must have a path
out of failing school systems — and the taxpayers’ money should follow
the student. 

UC San Diego bravely told the truth about how American public education
is failing. The rot it has exposed must motivate real change. 

https://nypost.com/2025/11/13/opinion/college-kids-math-skills-worse-than
-ever-blame-pass-the-buck-schools/