Not-so-surprising news arrived recently from the University of California at San Diego: Academically, the kids are not all right . Not even close. “Between 2020 and 2025, the number of freshmen whose math placement exam results indicate they do not meet middle school standards grew nearly thirtyfold,” a report from the university’s senate finds. “A similarly large share of students must take additional writing courses to reach the level expected of high school graduates.”

The university launched a remedial math course in 2016, designed for “a very small number of first-year students (less than 100 students a year or around one per cent of the incoming class) who were not prepared to start in our standard precalculus courses.” As of this autumn, there were 665 students in that course, r

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