A sharp rise in students without middle school-level math skills is raising alarms among educators and policymakers.
A sharp rise in students entering the University of California system without middle school-level math skills is raising alarms among educators. A new internal report from the University of California, San Diego reveals that the percentage of incoming students scoring below Algebra 1 on placement exams—a math course typically completed by the end of eighth grade—has tripled over the past five years.
Why It Matters In 2020, just 6 percent of first-year students at UCSD placed below Algebra 1. By 2025, that number had surged to 18 percent, according to the UCSD Senate Admissions Working Group report. The findings reflect a growing disconnect between high school transcripts and actual college readiness. The SAWG report links the increase to pandemic-era learning disruptions, long-standing inequities in California’s K–12 system, and the elimination of standardized testing requirements in UC admissions. What To Know The number of UCSD students requiring Math 2, a course originally designed for less than 1 percent of the incoming class, surged from under 100 students annually to over 900 by fall 2024. “In Fall 2024, the numbers of students placing into Math 2 and 3B surged further, with over 900 students in the combined Math 2 and 3B population,” the report notes. “This represents an alarming 12.5 percent of the incoming first-year class.” Math 2, once intended to cover high school topics like Algebra I and II, has been redesigned to focus “entirely on elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects .” A new course, Math 3B, was created to handle high school-level content. UCSD is now the only UC campus that offers a credit-bearing course designed to remediate elementary and middle school math. Students walk to their classrooms at a middle school in Los Angeles on September 10, 2021. Placement test data shows a worsening gap between what students appear qualified for on paper and their actual ability. “In Fall of 2024, of those who demonstrated math skills not meeting middle school levels, only 6 percent met only the minimum high school course requirement,” the report states. “The other 94 percent went beyond, with 42 percent completing Calculus or Precalculus.” The report concludes that GPA and course titles have become unreliable predictors of readiness. “Over 25 percent of the students in Math 2 had a math grade average of 4.0,” the authors write. Other Findings Remedial math placements correlate closely with prior school conditions. “In 2023–2024, the combined enrollment in Math 2/3B grew by another 100 students, 63 of whom came from LCFF+ schools,” referring to California schools with high concentrations of low-income, English learner, or foster youth students. By 2025–2026, 1 in 3 LCFF+ enrollees required Math 2 or 3B. The report acknowledges the tension between access and readiness. “We cannot simply admit only from better-resourced schools,” the report says. “This would replicate privilege and fail to support our mission as an institution that promotes social mobility.” Faculty concern over academic alignment is central to the report’s recommendations. “We face an enormous uncertainty when judging the math skills of our applicants,” the committee wrote. What People Are Saying CalMatters columnist Dan Walters wrote in a February 4 piece: “California’s education system is not only behind most other states, but even trails those that Newsom and other Californians consider to be culturally backward.” California School Boards Association CIO Troy Flint told EdSource in October: “We shouldn’t let a point or two in a positive direction detract from the fact that millions of California students are still being underserved and those students are disproportionately concentrated in certain demographic groups that have been lacking for decades.” What Happens Next In its closing, the committee warns that admitting large numbers of profoundly underprepared students risks harming the very individuals the institution aims to support by setting them up for failure. They are proposing a new “Math Index,” a statistical model designed to estimate an applicant’s probability of placing into remedial math using transcripts, grades, and high school background.
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