College kids’ math skills worse than ever, 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 Donald 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.

Karol Markowicz is the host of the “Karol Markowicz Show” and “Normally” podcasts.