Once again...the math horror show

A couple of months ago, I posted about some disturbing statistics about how the current generation of high school students are struggling with mathematics (see "U.S. high school reading and math scores at an all-time low").  According to a 2024 statistics released by the Nation's Report Card, a branch of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the Department of Education,  twenty-two percent of 12th graders performed at or above what is defined as a proficient level in mathematics.  The Wall Street Journal published an article with an accompanying editorial that same week (September 9, 2025) entitled "Another K-12 Education Disaster" and wrote that "nearly half [of high school seniors] can't do rudimentary math."  I ended my post by stating, "What is clear to me (and not political) is that whatever we've been doing in the last decade or so just isn't working.  Education is too important an issue - we don't just need to get a "passing grade" with our education system (and we aren't), we should be trying to get straight A's!"

I recently read yet further confirmatory evidence of just how widespread this problem has become.  Again, the Wall Street Journal recently published an article entitled "A math horror show at UC San Diego" on November 25, 2025 that reported "At one of California's top universities, many freshmen are unable to do middle-school math."  UCSD is one of our nation's top public universities, ranking sixth in the annual U.S. News and World Report rankings.  And yet, they found that one in eight freshmen have math skills that fall below the high-school level - a 30-fold increase since 2020!  More concerning, one in twelve freshmen have math skills that fall below middle-school levels.  And yet, the average high-school math GPA for entering freshmen taking a middle-school remedial math course was an A minus.

In a follow-up editorial ("The college students who can't do elementary math"), the Wall Street Journal defined rudimentary high-school math skills as "geometry, algebra, and algebra 2."  In addition, they expanded on the scope of the problem, stating that "Students who had been placed in a remedial high-school math class in 2023 had roughly fifth-grade-level [math] abilities.  Only 39% could correctly round the number 374,518 to the nearest hundred - a third-grade skill."

There's a lot here to unpack.  I am sure that UCSD is not alone in their experience here.  The editors at the Wall Street Journal have some theories that I do not fully agree with (rampant grade inflation in high school, the fact that the University of California system stopped requiring standardized testing for enrollment, lower standards to increase the diversity of the student body, etc), but I do agree with their conclusion that "The sum of all this is a tragedy of the education commons."  The impact on the deteriorating skills in mathematics (as well as other subjects) remains to be seen, but I for one am deeply concerned about our future.  Given the direction that society is moving, skills in the STEM courses are going to be more important than ever.  And it seems that we are jeopardizing our future.