by Leonard Sax (@unfragilekids)
The University of California San Diego (UCSD) is widely regarded as one of the leading public universities in America, ranked #6 nationwide by US News & World Report. But school leaders at UCSD recently acknowledged that many of their freshmen can’t do high school math. One in 12 UCSD freshmen can’t even do middle-school math, meaning that they struggle to solve basic problems such as “6 + 4 = 5 + __.” Former U.S. Senator Ben Sasse, reviewing the UCSD report, noted that the number of freshmen entering UCSD whose math skills fall below a high-school level has increased nearly 30-fold over just the past five years. And UCSD is not alone. Every other University of California campus, including the flagship schools UC Berkeley and UCLA, have seen the number of first-years who are unprepared for precalculus double or triple.
