Imagine being a STEM professor in the University of California system.
Once the crown jewel of a state that boasts some of the biggest and most advanced high-tech companies in the world, you are now struggling to teach middle-school math to students who have been told that they have been prepared to become high achievers.
It must be frustrating as hell. In fact, we know it is because they are now standing up and demanding that the university system reverse its policy, implemented at the height of the George Floyd madness, of dropping standardized tests from its admissions process.
The entry tests were done away with in 2020, fyi
— Geoffrey Ingersoll (@GPIngersoll) May 27, 2026
It’s impossible to fully account the wreckage caused by black lives matter https://t.co/ci5x2zk8b3
The United States ranks #4 in spending per student worldwide, and only Luxembourg spends substantially more. Japan, for instance, spends only 75% as much per student, and the rest of the OECD is in the same ballpark. The United States is very much on the tail end of the spending curve, yet student performance keeps tanking.
The response, driven by the education industry, is to toss metrics out the window in the name of "equity." The result is students entering colleges and universities who have been told they are the best in the world, but whose abilities don't match what middle schoolers routinely did not so long ago—a time when we all sensed that education was already in crisis.
To the UC Regents, UCOP, Academic Senate leadership, and the people of California:
We write as University of California mathematics faculty, joined by faculty from other STEM disciplines. UC has long served students from every background and has been a powerful engine of social mobility for the people of California. That public trust must be protected for future generations. Today, UC's mission is at risk. To preserve that mission:
We call for the reinstatement of the SAT/ACT mathematics requirement for applicants to STEM majors beginning with the 2027 admissions cycle, alongside STEM faculty oversight of readiness standards and admissions practices affecting those majors.
Over the past five years, we have seen a widening divergence in mathematical preparation levels within the same classroom. This trend indicates that current admissions practices do not provide a sufficiently reliable check on mathematical readiness for STEM majors. The UC San Diego Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions report documents this crisis in stark terms: in the last five years, the number of students whose mathematics skills fall below high school level increased nearly thirtyfold; moreover, 70% of those students fall below middle school levels, reaching roughly one in twelve members of the entering cohort. These findings are corroborated by data across our campuses. For example, for three consecutive years, 20-30% of UC Berkeley first-semester calculus students who participated in mathematical diagnostic testing displayed severe preparation deficits.
Basic mathematical fluency is analogous to literacy; without it, success in university-level STEM becomes structurally unattainable for students. We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields. UC has been a national leader in supporting under-resourced students to do well in mathematics. However, UC has finite resources and can help only so many students, and only when the preparation deficits they need to overcome are within reach.
Furthermore, the widening spread between underprepared and well-prepared students creates polarized courses, weakening the foundation available to many students and making it harder to teach at the level required for advanced STEM work. UC is increasingly unable to provide its students with the education needed to become leaders in California's scientific, technological, and economic future. We are already seeing the warning signs: longer pathways through prerequisite material, reduced readiness for advanced coursework, and growing pressure to dilute quantitative rigor. Left unaddressed, these trends will lead to declining graduation rates, longer time to degree, and reduced completion of STEM majors, with consequences for California's highly skilled STEM workforce.
Hundreds of professors in STEM fields have had enough. So much so that they have stuck their necks out and said the quiet part out loud: the pursuit of "equity" has meant that problems with California's education system have been swept under the rug, and a generation of mathematically illiterate students is being sent to the university system, utterly unprepared to perform.
No doubt the same is true for the preparation of students not in STEM; it's just that you cannot hide failure in STEM fields the way you can in the Humanities and social sciences.
For decades teachers have said, in the most self righteous manner possible, that they're the ones who know what is best for children and are the only ones who can prepare them properly for the future, yet those same teachers do not teach children reading, writing, and arithmetic. https://t.co/dryiBSe6HM
— alexandriabrown (@alexthechick) May 27, 2026
DEI math teaching is based on the labor theory of math: your effort, not achievement, is what counts in K-12 grading, and the demand that students get the right answer is white supremacy.
If so, it takes white supremacy to build a bridge or study physics.
It's striking how, during the George Floyd/COVID years, teachers' unions agitated to eliminate standards, and universities seized on the trend, doing much the same. The claim was that testing was racist; the reality was that standardized testing exposed the rot in our educational system.
Our entire educational system is corrupt, and I am beginning to believe that the government should get out of the education business because politics has been a key reason for that corruption. Parents should form educational collectives or something similar, and the humanities might need to be separated into parallel institutions within our post-secondary education system.
I'm pretty sure that wouldn't solve the problem, though, because it's cultural, at least in some groups of people.
At a minimum, parents who can should divorce themselves from public education. It's not that there aren't pockets of good teachers and even schools; but the system as a whole is fundamentally corrupt.
Editor's Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.
Help us continue exposing Democrats' plans to lead America down a dangerous path. Join HotAir VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member