I teach calculus at Berkeley. Some of my students can’t do middle school math

[SVPete]

I teach calculus at Berkeley. Some of my students can’t do middle school math

https://sfstandard.com/opinion/2026/08/15/uc-berkeley-sat-test-blind-admissions-math-scores/

In March, two California families opened college admissions decisions that should make anyone who cares about higher education stop and think.

One student — I’ll call him Elias — was admitted to a top University of California engineering program. His family was thrilled though surprised. Math had been his weakest subject in high school, but they assumed the university had seen something they hadn’t.

Another student — Nadia — watched rejection after rejection arrive from UC campuses. One turned her down even though she had earned A’s there in Calculus II and other college-level STEM courses through concurrent enrollment.

These are real students. I’ve changed their names, and withheld their schools, to protect their privacy.
Seen side by side, their outcomes don’t make sense. They make perfect sense only if you imagine admissions working less like careful evaluation and more like chance.
...
I teach mathematics at UC Berkeley. Three days a week, I stand in front of lecture halls with 500 to 1,400 students. By the second week of the semester, I already know who is in trouble. Some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics. Office hours that should be spent discussing integrals instead become lessons on fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school.

That is why this spring and summer, thousands of faculty members across all 10 UC campuses — including more than two-thirds of UC’s mathematics faculty — signed open letters(opens in new tab) urging the system to restore the SAT and ACT in admissions. Five Nobel laureates joined us, along with professors from across the university, including Beatriz Manz, Berkeley’s first Latina full professor.

1. Invisible to much of the world, because engineering students tend not to make "news-worthy" noise, UC Berkeley has long had a top-level college of engineering. The scheme of random, non-pre-tested, students means either fewer students go into engineering, or more students try and fail. Either way the number and possibly "quality" of engineering grads has declined.

2. Note how carefully this author treads. She (the byline family name is in Slavic feminine form) did not mention that the oft-rejected "Nadia" is probably Asian or white. In her paragraph about the professors' "open letter", she made a point of mentioning that a signee is female and Hispanic, a probably unsuccessful attempt to preclude denunciation of the letters as racist. Without calling it out directly, she is hinting, not weakly, but not quite strongly, that UC is still discriminating against Asians and whites, with unsurprising consequences in the student population's aggregate preparedness and eventual outcomes (does it do an unprepared person of a favored ethnicity any favor by admitting them to a university for which they are unprepared and from which they are likely to drop out?!).

[ADsOutburst]

Gen Z: Can't read. Can't do math. Can't manage money.

(I'm sure those things are all linked).

[enslaved1]

These anecdotes and surveys and scores keep coming up every couple of months or so, our kids are dumb as a box of rocks, the education system is broken, and then the news cycle moves on.  The issue didn't develop overnight, it's not getting fixed overnight, but public schools, colleges, local school boards, many parents and many teachers aren't doing anything to fix the problems.  All those parts need to come together before we can get out of this very deep hole the US is in with regards to education. 

Also have to struggle with the string pullers who prefer an ignorant, easily distracted populace to play their chess games with. 

[DefiantSix]

I teach calculus at Berkeley. Some of my students can’t do middle school math

I would think Berzerkley would SELECT for math ig'nant students like this. After all, if they can perform basic math, they can't be sold on the perfection of socialism, and if they can't be indoctrinated to the wonderfulness of socialism, why, exactly are they at Berzerkley???

 

[SVPete]

... The issue didn't develop overnight, it's not getting fixed overnight, but public schools, colleges, local school boards, many parents and many teachers aren't doing anything to fix the problems. ...

IMO, the problem with Math began at least in the mid 1960s when the "New Math" fad became the standard Math curriculum. The old methods, which worked, got shoved aside for something believed to be less boring, but was confusing and less simple. Parents, who knew how to do the things supposedly being taught, could not figure out the process being taught.

The failing "Look-Say" word-memorization method of teaching Reading, which has never been @#$%-canned for what actually works, Phonics, came into schools' curriculums in the 1950s or 1940s. Why Johnny Can't Read, which called out the method's failure, was published in 1955!

Too many school educrats are part of the problem. Colleges' "Education Schools" feed and perpetuate the problem. Teachers unions fund their puppets' board of education campaigns. Too many parents are caught up in, "My kids' school isn't that bad," thinking and don't pay attention.

Private school tuition is expensive, and homeschooling means (over-simplifying some) being a single-income family, not easy to do in the US. Unions keep their shills on school boards, and have members who will retaliate against the children of parents who dare to "cause problems".

Changing all that into an actual system that educates will be a revolution, IMO.