We used to be able to assume that high school and college graduates could do elementary school math. Maybe what we used to do would be more palatable if we weren't pissing away money on dysfunctional public education.
Alternatively, we have decades of credentials inflation such that our high school graduates can indeed do math - but we choose to pretend they can’t and instead insist that an expensive undergraduate degree is required for entry level work.
First, that's UCSD, not UC Davis. They mention UC Davis in the report, but the 8.5% refers to UCSD.
Secondly, mastering high school math is genuinely difficult these days. I'm a math major, I've made it through my calc courses and differential equations, but I found Algebra 2 legitimately hard. Logarithms and Trigonometric functions are counterintuitive, and not everybody is at their peak ability to buckle down and grind through things when they're struggling at age 17.
And lastly, this is pretty obviously at least in part a knock-on affect of covid, hence the extremely recent major spike. I'm not sure it's worth generalizing from "UC San Diego Students admitted in the last couple of years are struggling with high school math (because they were in high school during lockdown)" to "We shouldn't try paying mechanics more because everyone's bad at math"
While Math 2 was designed in 2016 to remediate missing high school math knowledge, now most students had knowledge gaps that went back much further, to middle and even elementary school. To address the large number of underprepared students, the Mathematics Department redesigned Math 2 for Fall 2024 to focus entirely on elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects (grades 1-8), and introduced a new course, Math 3B, so as to cover missing high-school common core math subjects (Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II or Math I, II, III; grades 9-11).
So actually I was wrong. I should have said:
- 11.8% of UCSD freshmen haven't mastered high school math
- 8.5% haven't mastered middle school math
These folks may have had some disruption during the last year of middle school, and the first year of high school. But does that fully explain why they haven't mastered middle school math or, in some cases, elementary school math?
The comment to which I responded quibbled with mhb saying "We used to be able to assume that high school and college graduates could do elementary school math."
It's clear from the report I linked that we cannot assume that high school graduates can do elementary school math.
> It's clear from the report I linked that we cannot assume that high school graduates can do elementary school math.
Well, I wouldn't necessarily assume that 100% of anyone with a degree has mastered what the degree is for. So to me the takeaway is that ~90% have mastered the math. And so in terms of the original comment, not necessarily do we need them all to go to undergraduate.
You'd better duck before the people who "don't test well" come for you. There are millions of people out there who swear they know a ton of things and have great skills in math/science/whatever, but when asked to demonstrate them in any verifiable way (a "test") they freeze up and perform poorly. I don't really think those people are all lying (it's probably an anxiety disorder) but the entire notion of being able to empirically measure knowledge/skills/aptitude is controversial to some people.
It doesn't matter if bad testers exist. Presumably, the percentage of them is not increasing over time, so the drift can still be measured. And if they are increasing over time, then the drift is still measuring something.
There sure seem to be more. Enough that some colleges have been bullied into eliminating the SAT or ACT requirements entirely, by those who allege they're unfair to that group. So those schools just admit based on the "homework grades" that are inflated by getting credit just for showing up and trying, success optional.
So IDK maybe there are more. Or maybe they are just louder now.
The suspension of SAT/ACT requirements was mostly a pandemic measure (and is being wound down) not something colleges were bullied into by people alleging unfairness (they are people alleging unfairness, they just aren't what got the policies implemented.)
> some colleges have been bullied into eliminating the SAT or ACT requirements entirely
"Starting in Fall 2026, a growing list of high-profile universities will once again require standardized test scores for admission, including most of the Ivy League, Stanford, and Georgetown to name a few" [1].
> Enough that some colleges have been bullied into eliminating the SAT or ACT requirements entirely, by those who allege they're unfair to that group. So those schools just admit based on the "homework grades" that are inflated by getting credit just for showing up and trying, success optional.
You drank the kool-aid. There was no bullying there. It was logistics.
In almost all cases, standardized test results were made optional. They were not “eliminated”.
Those who did not supply standardized test results, at least at any school that actually rejected people, had to provide a higher standard of proof of their abilities in their admissions materials.
I live in CA, and I know quite a few folks who glibly didn’t take or submit standardized test scores, and they absolutely did not get into schools that they were very academically qualified for (e.g., mid-tier UC schools like UCSD). These schools normally would have been safety schools for the given caliber of applicant.
Ivies made the SAT optional for a while, especially in 2020, but that was largely due to an access issue. I think they all require it now. And again, any person who didn’t have an SAT score and got admitted was almost certainly a strong admit anyway (super strong external academic validation, recruited athlete, etc.). I’m guessing precisely zero people sneaked into an Ivy by slyly not submitting a standardized test score while also being a marginal applicant.
A ton of high school graduates can't do basic math (which also explains their economic illiteracy, like believing that just taxing billionaires more would fix everything[1]).
And also at the same time, we demand college degrees for white-collar jobs that anyone who completed the alleged requirements to graduate high school could totally do. I think this stems from an outdated belief that college is difficult and challenging, and therefore getting through it proves you're exceptionally clever. A notion that has been a joke for at least 15 years if not 20.
So everything is fake. The diplomas are fake, the degrees are fake, and the job requirements are fake. All of it is being used to come up with legal and justifiable ways to pick the people with sufficient brain cells to be entrusted with job responsibilities.
[1] Most college graduates would likely get this question orders of magnitude wrong: If you could split the full net worth of the top 10 billionaires equally among every man, woman, and child in America how big would each one's check be? Correct answer: Just over $6,000. (Of course, we'll ignore how to deal with the market crash caused by forcing the sudden liquidation of their 2 trillion dollars in assets.)
Does going to college and learning say, compilers or differential equations not have value? Your employer won't teach you. Please don't tell me the heat equation is fake.
I think they're saying that learning compilers, differential equations, or the heat equation aren't actually that relevant for getting a mid-level procurement job or becoming the manager of a hotel.
Imagine trying to advance that the proposition of taxing billionaires is negatable on basic math. That's a critical thinking error, probably compounded by a lack of education in humanities and civilization not a basic math problem.
Tax them, don't tax them, I don't care. But you can't argue with the math that a one-time $6k or even $12k per person will not pay for the welfare state the DNC keeps promising us. Please, prove me wrong, show me the math of how you're going to take the billionaires' money (even discounting the fact it'll destroy every retirement account when that market shock happens) and pay for free college for all, double pay for teachers, triple the minimum wage, give free houses to everyone who can't afford them now.
The point isn't whether they should pay a higher tax rate (probably they should!) -- it's whether it would be massively transformative to our society if/when we enacted that. I argue it is not. Pretending it is, is the Marxist fringe's version of the welfare queen or the illegal immigrant murderer that the right-wing people try to bamboozle their base with. We could eliminate all welfare fraud and all immigrant criminals by magic and it wouldn't make our society wildly better. It would be a small improvement.
taxing billionaires isn't just about redistributing their money. it's about changing the objective functions that motivate the ultrawealthy.
when they see diminishing returns for increasing their net worth, they might think "hey, maybe instead of using my immense resources to further enrich myself i should do... anything else"
All right, but since I’ve pointed out that it won’t solve any of the main structural issues in our economy to even fully eliminate the billionaire class, what’s the purpose to society of coercing them to stop acquiring money? Just envy?
Well most of the people you're strawmanning also support raising corporate taxes, and generally also on millionaires. I get that the imaginary blue haired nonbinary public school grad in your head exclusively uses the word "billionaire," though.
> discounting the fact it'll destroy every retirement account when that market shock happens
You're correct on the fact that taxing billionaires doesn't generate meaningful revenue. You're wrong that it would prompt a stock-market crash.
If one raised top tax rates in a revenue-neutral way, one would expect it to massively boost the economy and thus the stock market. You'd have unlocked more money for high-velocity spenders.
> You're wrong that it would prompt a stock-market crash.
It certainly would.
Where do you think those billionaires would get the money to pay the tax? It’s not like they have billions of dollars in cash somewhere; they’d sell assets. Those assets are predominately stock. Selling off that much stock at once would absolutely disrupt the markets.
> Selling off that much stock at once would absolutely disrupt the markets
...don't do this.
The combined net worth of America's billionaires is about $7tn. Let's assume half of that is in public stocks. That's $3.5tn. That's about what retail investors alone bought "in the first six months of 2025" [1].
Given the fundamentals of the companies wouldn't have changed, this would be a massive opportunity for institutional investors to deploy capital. (If you didn't do the tax in a revenue-neutral manner, you'd free up tonnes of capital from Treasury demand.)
One might expect a dip in companies where a single billionaire holds a large fraction of the float, e.g. Tesla, Amazon, et cetera. But broadly speaking, these aren't numbers which–even if compressed to a single year, which isn't how you'd pass such legislation–would cause a crash.
There are good arguments against super taxes. Crashing the stock market isn't one of them.
Well most talk of taxing billionaires involves capital gains taxes, not one time wealth taxes, and the serious lefties care more about nationalizing their assets than taxing them.
But yeah, the imaginary tax proposals invented in this thread may or may not work out, i wouldn't call anything about them "certain" though
100K per family by my math. Don't know why you believe that only the top 10 billionaires have too much personal wealth.
Why does society need to create a increasingly out of touch class of people that think they are morally justified in telling people how to live their lives. The simple fact is that if the government didn't give these people billions in subsidies we would never have to hear them bloviate, Musk, Farely, all these rich A-Holes keeping America stuck in the local minima of car ownership would be utterly irrelevant.
> Why does society need to create an increasingly out of touch class of people that think they are morally justified in telling people how to live their lives.
Is that a… libertarian argument for wealth confiscation?
Why does government need to take a bunch of people’s money for no reason other than “because I’m mad you have more money than me”? Or I suppose the motivation you described is actually that we don’t like how influential successful people are. So, should everyone whose opinion we don’t like be treated this way?
There are rich and poor in every society and always have been - it’s not a government failing to have income inequality. In extreme socialist regimes, the government officials themselves are always the ultra-wealthy - because they make the rules on who gets to keep their money and their choice is “Me.”
The most dysfunctional aspects of public education have less to do with the education and more to do with the home lives of the children we are trying to educate.
In my town, most of the cost of education is just paying teachers. The school system is expensive because paying a lot of teachers is expensive, as is maintaining school buildings. And guess what? Teachers still don't make that much, especially because the union typically has to fight hard for the even basic cost-of-living raises, classroom materials are often not reimbursed by the school, and teachers have hours of unpaid non-overtime overtime work.
And the funny thing about the cost of living raises? The costs are going up because of things like housing, food, and energy for heating. Corporate profits are at generational highs and wealth inequality is growing. So teachers, just like the rest of us, are subject to greater and greater consumer surplus extraction, effectively sucking wealth out of the towns where they live and work. And then taxpayers in those towns need to keep paying for their raises, but those same taxpayers are subject to the same consumer surplus extraction.
Families with two working parents, families struggling to pay for rent and heat and food, families where everyone is addicted to social media... none of that is conducive to kids showing up and being ready to spend 8 hours learning stuff, not to mention drilling and retaining and developing an understanding of what they learned.
Everything is politics and everything is economics. Society is a deeply interconnected ecosystem. School is dysfunctional because families are dysfunctional, suffering from degradation of social structures and severe economic pressure. School is expensive teachers are expensive, and teachers are expensive because they are suffering from the same economic pressure as the families who send their kids to school.
Every household is a little capillary in a great circulatory system of money. Income goes in one end and spending goes out the other end. What's happening now is that most capillaries are receiving smaller and smaller shares of the total flow, while some special ones are swollen larger than we have ever seen before. When people say that the system is rigged, this is what they mean. Is it any surprise that the people with the power to change where the money flows are using that power to make sure more of it flows to themselves?
There are plenty of high school and college graduates that can do elementary school math. They are just going into more lucrative fields. If Ford wants those candidates, they need to offer more competitive salaries.
You're likely being underpaid. I'm in Iowa and regularly see software devs with offers higher than that. The last company I was at, they brought an intern back with a $140k starting salary. He was making more than an "architect" who had been at the company for 16 years.
I'm not in SV either and $120k would be well below average for someone with 30 years experience in my area. Of course, "in tech" can mean a lot of things. From what I have seen, tech writers and IT help desk folk don't make nearly as much as SW developers.
That sucks, i learned JavaScript during the pandemic and make more than 120k at a corporate gig in Chicago (where salaries are certainly higher than Wichita but it's no SV). I don't even have a college degree.
My experience from actually having 2 kids currently in high school is that failing is damn near impossible, but GPA absolutely does mean something for most kids. There is definitely a group of kids at the bottom that in decades past would have been held back or dropped out and those kids are now just passed along. Is that better or worse than having them drop out? I don't really know, but the reality is that those kids likely wouldn't have been cut out for these jobs anyway. At the other end of the spectrum, the competition at the top can be fierce. My kids and their peers stress way more about their GPA than I ever did because competition for colleges has gotten tougher. The education is there for those who want to take advantage of it.
> Is that better or worse than having them drop out? I don't really know
It's worse. If they'd been held back earlier, they might have graduated high school prepared for the sorts of trades jobs this article discusses. Instead, they're processed through the system as a number. Best case, they aren't constantly disrupting their classrooms.
Again, from my personal experience of having kids in school, they do hold kids back in elementary and even middle school, but less so in high school. From what I have seen, they will strongly recommend it if they feel that a student is not ready for the next grade, but won't force it if the parents disagree. There’s not a whole lot else they can do. There’s no other place in society to support these kids at the bottom and the schools aren’t funded well enough to give them the one on one attention to catch them up.
> what happens to GPA if a kid is failed/held back a year?
For a kid who is held back a year, what good is any GPA? Genuine question.
I’m sure that one could construct some sort of edge case or corner case in which a college-bound kid has a bad year. That said, for each of those cases, I’m pretty sure I could come up with a perfectly good way for that person to find a reasonable path to a very good university.
That said, in most cases, the folks who are held back will have significant issues that will marginalize them anyway: social, psychological, cognitive, etc.
i could envision a situation where there's a kid that has a bad home-life situation that gets resolved or a stretch of bad mental health that could really turn things around from one year to the next.
> i could envision a situation where there's a kid that has a bad home-life situation that gets resolved or a stretch of bad mental health that could really turn things around from one year to the next.
This happens.
Usually they will not get held back. Usually the teachers will know what’s going on. A passing C (or even B) can be manufactured in these spots. This assumes that they are normally good students.
Also note that most schools that reject people have a spot on their application where an applicant can explain any sort of extenuating circumstances (e.g., parents divorce, etc.), and a bad year will be overlooked as long as it’s clear that they are back on track and can perform.
If someone has consistent performance issues and just happens to be smart, then they need to fix the performance issues. This is usually best done at a junior college and then a transfer to a four-year school (e.g., State U).
There is definitely a group of kids at the bottom that in decades past would have been held back or dropped out and those kids are now just passed along.
This is literally my point. What difference does it make if I heard it online
Is that better or worse than having them drop out?
it is worse given that it gives false signals for the job market and devalues the credential
My wife was a Title
I teacher high school for a while, there was a LOT of pressure to “pass” kids out of the system for that sweet Federal money and other lets say, “political” reasons (like internal/local level, not left/right stuff). And she absolutely did her best to get them to pass on their own merit, but there’s only so much you can do if students don’t have the prerequisites + culture and motivation.
Ahh, yes the key to mathematics being an issue is public education. We should privatize it so that half the population goes from under educated to completely uneducated.
Or maybe we could go with the coal town model and have children accrue debt to a major corporation that they can literally never pay off in exchange for an education!
I literally did not literally propose privatizing in these comments. Here all I said was that public schools are dysfunctional if they are producing high school and college graduates who can't do elementary school math.
The solution to that dysfunction was outside the scope of this discussion. Literally.
So literally privatizing schools. Because vouchers will simply cause public schools to collapse while allowing private schools to pick and choose who to educate. I can guarantee you they won’t be accepting the students with low math scores who have absentee parents that treat school like a daycare.
Let me guess: if we just ignore the scores of those problem children who no longer have access to education, the math scores will look better?
So that's the argument you want to have and you're not going to be happy until you have it? How about this? Assume that it's more important for your interlocutors to improve education than it is for them to win a debate. Assume that they would like everyone to get a great education.
Presumably, we agree that public schools, in general, are not, currently doing a great job. I'm also assuming that, for some reason, they used to do a significantly better job.
I don't know what the point would be of recapitulating Friedman's arguments for school choice and vouchers in these comments. He's much smarter and a better writer than anyone you're likely to find here. If you've read them and made up your mind, a handful of HN comments are not going to sway you. If you haven't read them you should.
