A blunt new report from the University of California at San Diego has ignited a fierce debate about declining student readiness and what that says about the state of higher education.
The report, compiled by an internal faculty group, painted a grim picture of the math and writing skills of the first-year class at UC-San Diego, among the nation’s most selective and prestigious institutions.
Over the past five years, the report said, the number of incoming students whose math skills fall below middle-school standards increased nearly thirtyfold — representing roughly one in eight freshmen — despite the fact that they had strong high-school grades.
Two out of five students with “severe deficiencies” in math also needed “remedial writing instruction” and were required to take additional writing courses to reach the high-school graduate level, the report found.
“Admitting large numbers of students who are profoundly underprepared risks harming the very students we hope to support, by setting them up for failure,” the faculty group wrote in the report. “Especially now, when our resources become more constrained, we cannot take on more remedial education than we can responsibly and effectively deliver.”
The findings prompted academics and others to weigh in on students’ preparation for college-level work. For some, the report highlighted the potential consequences of eliminating standardized-testing requirements and the challenges of serving more students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
In a joint statement, UC-San Diego’s chief academic officer and Academic Senate chair acknowledged the significant issues outlined in the report.
“The need to bring students up to speed has placed our math department under extraordinary strain,” Elizabeth H. Simmons, the executive vice chancellor, and Rebecca Jo Plant, a professor of history, told The Chronicle. “Grades on high-school transcripts too often bear little relationship to a student’s mastery of crucial skills: A student may have graduated with an A in calculus yet lack the capacity to solve simple algebraic equations.”
Experts on college preparation said the debate surrounding the report raises larger questions about how colleges should effectively balance student access with their own academic standards, and what their responsibility is, if any, in bringing students up to speed.
Contributing Factors
There’s no question that the pandemic helped drive UC-San Diego’s recent struggles. The Covid era had a profound effect on student learning everywhere, with K-12 schools experiencing vast disruptions from online learning loss and chronic absenteeism — both of which can influence academic preparedness.
While California’s rate of chronic student absenteeism at the K-12 level — defined as missing more than 10 percent of the school year — is down from its pandemic high of 30 percent, it’s still much higher than before Covid. Math and language scores haven’t fully recovered.
Students “had, maybe in core years of their high-school experience, fundamental challenges in terms of acquiring certain kinds of skills, foundational skills,” said Ethan Hutt, associate professor of education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “It’s very hard to make that up.”
Hutt said he was also struck by the report’s discussion of “transcript equality,” where students might take a course with the same title at different high schools but not come away with the same knowledge.
For instance, what algebra means can vary widely, Hutt said: “Attention to not just the course labels, but what students are actually learning is really important.”
And upticks in grade-point averages — which some experts point to as evidence of grade inflation — haven’t helped. Disruptions to in-person learning made it difficult to evaluate students’ progress. Many teachers in California and elsewhere temporarily shifted from letter grading to pass/fail evaluations and lowered their grading standards to acknowledge the special challenges students were facing.
What’s more, many school districts serving large numbers of low-income students are increasingly strapped for resources, said Timothy M. Renick, executive director of the National Institute for Student Success at Georgia State University. Fewer counselors, larger class sizes, and difficulty in hiring capable instructors has created “a national challenge,” Renick said.
“Those shortages are particularly dramatic in the sciences and STEM fields as the students begin to get into middle and high school,” he added. “So I have no doubt that the students and the high schools are struggling to get students to meet the criteria for math readiness.”
The UC system’s elimination of standardized testing in 2020 led institutions to rely more heavily on applicants’ high-school grades as a measure of readiness, though UC officials said removing the requirement didn’t affect its admission outcomes.
“One of the challenges in a system that is decentralized, like the American system, and when we don’t often have common curricula, teacher standards, is that you need national metrics,” Hutt said. “You need metrics that help compare the preparation across different contexts and the SAT, traditionally for 100 years, has done that function.”
Tensions Over Access
The report also cites as a challenge the fact that UC-San Diego has recently increased recruitment efforts at underresourced high schools, part of a broader UC system push for its campuses to look more like the state of California, racially and ethnically.
Compared with the rest of the system, UC-San Diego has in recent years enrolled the most students from high schools that serve low-income populations. Roughly 1,800 students each year from 2022 to 2024 came to UC-San Diego from such high schools, known in California as LCFF+ institutions.
Many of those students have arrived less academically prepared than their peers, the report said.
That disparity became particularly acute during the pandemic, Renick said. “For students who came from well-resourced high schools and tended to end up at elite institutions, there was very little trackable drop-off in how they performed once they got to college,” he said. “But for low-income students, first-generation students, students from minority backgrounds … the impacts were much more extreme.”
The report highlights a fundamental tension: If colleges that expand access to underserved students don’t have the capacity to adequately support them, are they setting up those students, and themselves, for failure?
UC-San Diego faculty suggested in the report that the university should take steps to limit admissions of students with inadequate math preparation.
They recommended a shift away from considering students’ GPAs and instead calculating a “math index,” a composite score based on available transcript data like grades, level of coursework, and the high school they attended.
Faculty members also suggested mandating math-placement testing and the return of standardized-testing requirements.
But education experts like Hutt warn there is no overnight fix to make up for the cultural shift experienced by students after Covid. “It’s not just the literal what’s happening in school, but the conversations around school, the orientation to school,” that has exacerbated “all the other dynamics we’re worried about,” he said.
