Why College Students Suddenly Can’t Do Basic Math | The Deep

Lower-level math students at a major American public university were presented with this math problem on a test. 7 plus 2 equals x plus 6, and 25% of them could not answer the question. These students weren't dropouts. They weren't unmotivated. They were freshmen at the University of California, San Diego. In November 2025, UC San Diego, one of the most respected Public universities in the country released a report that should have set off alarm bells nationwide. Here's what they found. Students testing below high school math levels increased 30-fold since 2020.

Only 41% could correctly answer 7th grade math questions, and just 19% could answer 8th grade level problems. Remedial math 2 enrollment exploded, from 32 students in fall 2020 to over 1,000 students in fall 2025. Let that sink in. A thousand college students at a flagship public university were placed in math so basic that a quarter of them could not balance a simple equation involving addition.

Admissions officers were baffled, because on paper, these students looked excellent. Fully 42% of the students who couldn't solve this equation had reported passing advanced math or calculus in high school. I couldn't believe it myself, until I started digging. If you look with me below the surface, past the transcripts and the shocking math scores, past the skyrocketing remedial math enrollment, you too will realize this isn't just about math. It's about an entire system that stopped teaching children and then sent them to college anyway.

It's the same crisis that has driven down literacy rates. It's the same crisis that has... We've overseen the exodus of thousands of teachers from their profession. It's the same crisis that explains why, as student enrollment plunges, administration staffing levels soar. The good news? I think we already know how to fix it. This is the story of a California crisis that needs a Mississippi miracle.

Give credit where it's due. UCSD is far from alone in noticing a math crisis in its students, but it seems like they were among the very few schools willing to expose some really embarrassing statistics to public ridicule because they wanted to understand what went wrong. Let's dig into the university's own report. We had that initial shocking statistic. 25% of students in remedial math got 7 plus 2 equals x plus 6 wrong. Also, 61% could not round 374,518 to the nearest hundred, and 37% could not subtract fractions.

But we shouldn't blame UCSD for dismal math scores. It turns out they were sold a bill of fake. Prior to admission to the university, 25% of students who tested into remedial math once they got there had reported a 4.0 GPA in high school math on their transcripts. Not a B, not a C, a perfect GPA.

This wasn't a failure of the university, or even of the students. It looks like an issue that went back years before the students even applied to college. It was a systemic and personal failure of academic integrity. For decades, colleges relied on two basic tools to assess readiness. First, standardized tests, usually the SAT.

Second, high school transcripts. And over the last five years, both metrics collapsed. A 2024 analysis out of the University of Cincinnati used AI models to take every SAT math section from 2012 to 2023. And what did they find? A 71-point drop in SAT math rigor. From there, analysts were able to control for changes in test difficulties, and they found that student SAT scores declined by an average of four points per year. Over 10 years, we saw a 36-point decline in student performance.

This means that in 2023, admissions officers at American universities Unless they were running statistical analysis on changes in test difficulty themselves, we're working with a 107-point divergence between what the test claims to measure and what students actually know. In plain English, the SAT didn't just get easier, it became dishonest. To make matters worse, when COVID hit, standardized testing was dropped entirely from admissions requirements at most schools.

Even a poor measure was no longer available for the men and women responsible for deciding which students would be prepared to succeed at their schools. So, admissions officers turned to the only thing left, grades. And that's when the floor fell out. During the COVID pandemic, grade inflation shifted from a concerning trend to unbridled, system-wide endorsement.

Letter grades quietly disappeared from transcripts, pass-fail became common instead, and teachers were pressured explicitly and implicitly to keep failure rates low. One AP Calculus teacher in California told journalist Kelsey Piper, no one can do fractions. That teacher's student exam results certainly reflected this. In any given year, she said, out of 25 or 30 students, One student might get a 5 on the AP. One might scrape by with a 3, and everyone else gets 1s and 2s, and they all pass the course.

So, many of us might ask the obvious question. If they can't do calculus, why not fail them in the class? How are they even passing? Well, because if she did, this teacher explained, students would drop the class to protect their GPAs, and the school would stop offering calculus altogether. Another high school teacher on Reddit put it bluntly, if many students fail, it proves you are a bad teacher. Lowering standards is how you keep your job. The easiest way to be a better teacher is to give easier tests, easier grading, holding a review the day before a test.

That basically gives the students the test ahead of time. There are no professional incentives for teachers to hold students accountable for learning. In fact, they will be punished if they do so. This isn't ideology. No woke math needed. No 2 plus 2 equals 5 in sight.

It's our natural human instinct for cowardice and laziness, institutionalized. The purpose of a system is what it does. The purpose of the teaching profession, at its best, is to become obsolete, as students master material and themselves become the teachers of the next generation.

The purpose of the teaching profession in our educational system? Self-preservation. Which, it seems, can only be accomplished by lying to children, who don't even know what they don't know, and lying to universities about how ready they are for higher-level studies. Thomas Sowell has been warning about this for decades, and pointing out the warning signs that the American education system is broken.

The highest percentage of PhDs that American universities award to American students are in sociology, with the percentage of American-earned doctorates declining sharply as you move toward math, science, and engineering. Why has no one noticed? To make up the knowledge gap particularly in mathematics-intensive fields, universities increasingly relied on international students, not because they're geniuses, but because They can read, write, and do math. In Sowell's words, what we really have are international universities on American soil. The American K-12 system stopped producing students ready for higher education, and anyone who noticed was roundly mocked, including Sowell himself.

Colleges didn't fix the problem, and to be fair, the argument from UCSD admissions is that they couldn't. So, they worked around it. In 2024, even Harvard University, which boasts the hardest math class in the world among its offerings, announced that it, too, was instituting remedial math for its undergraduates. To their credit, some state schools are attempting to reach back into the high schools to catch failing math students and remediate them before they apply. UCSD has helped spearhead an effort called Mathematics Diagnostic Testing Project, whose mission is to, quote, Develop and provide diagnostic tools and training to support California mathematics educators in preparing students in California schools for success in current and subsequent mathematics courses.

They kind of get the idea, but will more testing and moving remedial math to 11th or 12th grade really address the root issue? I would argue, to solve the math crisis, we need a 20-year plan, not a 2-year plan. You need to go farther back, much farther. Enter the Mississippi Miracle. It turns out someone already figured this out. Here's the catch. The solution did not come from Harvard or Stanford or even the UC System's high school support program. It comes from Mississippi.

The Mississippi miracle made headlines last year when the results came back on the state's education reforms. Over the last 12 years, the low-budget, much-maligned red state had enacted a slew of educational reforms targeting the youngest. public school students, those in kindergarten through third grade. Those reforms catapulted Mississippi to the top in education achievement. For example, Mississippi's average fourth-grade reading score rose over 10 points to hit 219 on the nation's report card. That's above the national average of 214. Only a few years ago, Mississippi was trailing it by double digits.

We covered the Mississippi Miracle in one of our biggest videos of 2025, but we could have told the same story when it came to math. After adjusting for demographics in 2024, Mississippi was the nation's number one state in mathematics as well as reading.

Mississippi's third grade reforms worked because they did something radical. They incentivized teachers to tell the truth to themselves, their students, and their students' parents, and to tell the truth early. The math reforms included all the key elements that the UCSD admissions committee noticed have been missing in the high school mathematics practices. And which are designed to prevent the remedial math debacle we're seeing at universities today.

Clear standards with consequences, mandatory retention for students who can't read or pass math, targeted interventions, and teacher training aligned with accountability. The results? Students held back after failing the reading test dropped from 9% in 2019 to 6.5% in 2024. The results? Students held back after failing the reading test dropped from 9% in 2024. A Boston University study found that students who were held back in third grade for reading or math scored significantly higher in sixth grade tests than their peers who were passed along.

This wasn't cruelty. It was integrity paired with true compassion. Now imagine applying Mississippi's model, which is really just realigning the education system with its true purpose, across the country. It will work. That crucial third through fifth grade window, that classical grammar stage, is when memory is strongest, the fundamentals lock in, and bad habits can still be corrected. If a child can't do math in third grade, Fail them then. Not at age 19, not after student loans, and not after pretending to them for years that everything was just fine.

So, first order of business, Mississippi miracle. But we can't stop at mechanics. Resuscitating reading, writing, and arithmetic scores for small kids is a necessary first step. It will, however, be insufficient, and even Mississippi will fall back into ignorance again if we don't address the root problem. Back in the 1930s, John Dewey tried to make public education purely pragmatic and materialistic.

His science of learning stripped schools of meaning and launched America on the road to the current disaster UCSD and other schools of thought have faced. What other universities are facing? Education without meaning is a hollow shell of itself, and eventually will always fail, even in the mechanics. And here's why.

Children don't work hard because of rubrics or national exam scores. They work hard because they belong to something. The adults in their lives have a robust, united vision of what it means to grow into a flourishing young adult. Their teachers aren't in the education business to indulge their own vanity or desire to propagandize. They are in education to lead the children into truth. The world of very young children should be 10% reading, writing, and arithmetic, the useful bits of education, and 90% play, beauty, stories, dirt, music, relationships, the desirable bits of growing up.

That 90% of time is the space and ground from which they are free and encouraged to ask themselves the central question of all education, who am I? Which really is the question, what is man? As they grow, those questions in turn will make those useful bits of education, algebra, languages, worth the struggle to learn them. Children who are encouraged to explore that question from their earliest moments have a healthy spiritual core.

When the spiritual core is healthy, the mechanics of education can follow with the proper guidance, with Mississippi-style practices. To paraphrase Alan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind, the sacred turns out to be a basic need, like multiplying and dividing and fractions when it comes to education. An education with a soul is what we require. That's when math becomes more than passing the remedial class. That's when math becomes a response to harmony, proportion, and radiance in the non-physical world. It's when the beauty of mathematical objects or proofs, such as the golden ratio, the Fibonacci sequence, or the musical scale, inspires a childlike wonder in high school and university students, a means to understand themselves.

...as much as passing a math course. We call it the Mississippi Miracle, but it's really just a series of practical, proven steps. What will make it a miracle is reconnecting education with its sacred aspect. And until we can do that, we will keep graduating students who cannot solve 7 plus 2 equals x plus 6, and calling it success.

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