A report released earlier this month by the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) gives some startling numbers. UCSD is an elite public university—it ranks 6th among public colleges and 29th overall in U.S. News & World Report’s 2026 rankings—yet a growing share of its incoming students lack even basic math skills.
The report is from an admissions workgroup consisting of university faculty and a handful of administrators. It focuses on a remedial math course UCSD introduced in 2016 to help freshmen fill gaps in high school–level math. The course initially enrolled about one percent of incoming students. However, instructors began to realize many students lacked even more fundamental middle- and elementary-level math skills. In response, the math department split the course into two courses: one focused on elementary and middle school math, and the other on high school math.
By 2024, more than 900 students—12.5 percent of the entering freshman class at UCSD—placed into these remedial courses.
To give a sense of the skill deficiencies among students in these remedial courses, the report shows specific math problems along with the fractions of students who could answer them correctly. Here are three example questions at the elementary level (edited very lightly for presentation here):
- Fill in the blank: 7 +2 = __ + 6
- Round the number 374518 to the nearest hundred.
- Find (13/16)2
While it would be reasonable to expect every student who is accepted into an elite public university to be able to answer these questions correctly, many tested students could not. Just 75, 39, and 34 percent of test takers gave the correct answers to these questions, respectively.
The report identifies several factors that contribute to these disturbing—and frankly embarrassing—outcomes, including grade inflation in California’s K-12 schools that allows students to graduate with good grades but weak skills, the pandemic (every educator’s favorite scapegoat), and the UC system’s stubborn refusal to require standardized tests for admissions. But beneath all of this lies a deeper issue: a system-wide erosion of meritocracy. When merit is downplayed and standards are continually lowered, you end up with students arriving at elite universities unable to do elementary math.
To be clear, UCSD is not the only institution that has this problem, and I don’t want to punish it unduly for being transparent. In fact, the report talks about similar problems at other UC campuses, and what it describes aligns with my own experience as a professor at the University of Missouri.
There is evidence all around us of the shift away from meritocracy in education. Nationally and in Missouri, student grades, and high school and college graduation rates, are at historic or near-historic highs despite clear evidence of declining academic skills. Educational administrators at all levels of schooling have demonstrated a blatant disregard for excellence.
(Disclosure: I am a proud alumnus of UC San Diego—though less so by the day—where I received my BA, MA, and Ph.D.)
