Time to admit failure in UC admissions standards

Back in 2020, the University of California system dropped SAT and ACT test scores from admissions decisions in pursuit of social engineering instead of academic achievement. The predictable-and dramatic-decline in student preparedness for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) majors now has hundreds of UC professors sounding the alarm.

"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 professors in STEM fields wrote in an open letter to the UC Regents and administrators calling for the return of the use of standardized math test scores for STEM-related majors.

The letter has been signed by more than 1,300 faculty members, including 45 STEM department chairs. It also notes that professors face "growing pressure to dilute quantitative rigor." In other words, rather than admitting more qualified applicants, the administration has chosen to pressure professors to dumb down the material.

In 2016, UC San Diego established a remedial math course intended to serve a small number of first-year students with gaps in high-school level math skills. In recent years, however, the number of students that needed to take the class exploded-from 32 in 2020 to 665 in 2025-and deficiencies have become so bad that the course had to be redesigned to cover middle school and even elementary level skills.

A November 2025 report by UCSD's Senate–Administration Workgroup on Admissions found that about one in every eight students in the 2025 incoming class failed to meet high school math standards-and about 70% of those students did not even meet middle school standards.

For example, 61% of students who took a skills assessment test designed and administered by the UCSD Mathematics Department could not correctly round the number 374,518 to the nearest hundred (a third-grade skill). Twenty-five percent could not solve the following equation: 7 + 2 = __ + 6 (a first-grade skill).

While the COVID-19 pandemic is one factor in the drop in math (as well as writing and language) skills, the UCSD report notes that the elimination of standardized testing, grade inflation and increased admissions from "underresourced" high schools also play significant roles.

The UC admissions controversy is not limited to its undergraduate programs. Last month, the U.S. Justice Department found that UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine "discriminated against other applicants to benefit preferred race classes of black and Hispanic," Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, asserted in a letter to an attorney for the University of California. "This discrimination is apparent from the documents expressing an intent to discriminate, plus the significant disparity in objective academic metrics between black and Hispanic applicants compared with applicants from other racial categories."

The letter noted that the median GPAs for the 2023 incoming class were 3.81 for Asians, 3.75 for whites, 3.63 for blacks and 3.55 for Hispanics. Similarly, median MCAT scores were 514 (88th percentile) for both Asians and whites and 507 (68th percentile) for both blacks and Hispanics. Racial preferences in admissions decisions were effectively banned by the U.S. Supreme Court's Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision in 2023, though they seem to persist under the UC's "holistic" admissions policy.

But, as the UC faculty letter observes, "Failing to measure preparation gaps does not remove barriers; it moves them into the classroom, where they become harder to overcome. An admissions process that ignores foundational readiness does a disservice to the most vulnerable students."

In seeking to increase the number of students from certain racial groups, the current UC admissions policy is setting up unprepared students to fail, oftentimes while saddling them with many thousands of dollars in student loan debt. It also wastes university resources and harms qualified students of all races by reducing the quality of instruction (and, thus, the reputation of the university and value of graduates' degrees), as professors are forced to divert instruction time to helping unprepared students catch up to the rest of the class.

If California really wants to expand opportunities, it must do the hard work of putting K-12 educational quality ahead of teachers' union interests and ensuring that students of all backgrounds are prepared to succeed in college and beyond. That also means rededicating classroom instruction to the basics-reading, writing and math-rather than wasting precious time advocating far-left racial and gender ideologies, climate alarmism and whatever other politicizations or fads of the day lawmakers and bureaucrats wish to impose on students.

Adam B. Summers is a columnist, economist, and public policy analyst, and a former editorial writer for the Orange County Register/Southern California News Group. He is also editor and coauthor of Beyond Homeless: Good Intentions, Bad Outcomes, Transformative Solutions.

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