professors who don't/can't cover their curriculum also get in trouble. if i had to dedicate half of my classes to reteaching things the students are required to know before taking my class, i would not cover what i am supposed to, which then has a knock-on effect to the classes that my class is a prereq for.
whenever i have had a larger-than-normal percent of my students failing, i am provided an opportunity to explain it.
The full letter (https://ucstudentsuccess.org/) gestures towards "growing pressure to dilute quantitative rigor". The strong implication seems to be that some administrators have told some faculty that the failure rates you'd get from holding the line are unacceptable. Presumably they don't want to frame this issue as a faculty vs. administration thing, which makes sense to me.
it seems to me this is a ratcheting effect. If a larger than average is discouraged, even implicitly by being called to a meeting, people will target under the average. Repeat this and you'll quickly find the average plummeting
In part this is a consequence of blank slate ideology, which presupposes that all students are equally capable of identical outcomes and that individual student failures are always / usually systemic failures in disguise.
This is a silly perspective, but the blank slate folks really got their tendrils in just about anywhere. In reality, some people are simply bad at math. More education will help, but they will always be disadvantaged compared to people who are more naturally predisposed. (note, I'm quite bad at math myself)
It may seem altruistic to err on the side of caution here and try to catch the kids that fall through the gaps, (again, assuming that they are falling through the gaps due to systemic failures) but as the article points out, there is a limit to this approach; eventually it brings the talented students down and degrades the program.
Have you not seen Stand and Deliver? We’ve seen incredible teachers prove over and over again that no student is truly unreachable given enough time and attention.
Eh, I don’t know. We’re talking about high school math proficiency here. The upper 80% of students should be capable of passing that, in my estimation. Regardless of differences in capability among that 80% (which I acknowledge!)
That's a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.
Treating universities as a system, it is deeply problematic and even immoral to saddle students with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to enter programs that it is entirely predictable that the student will fail at.
The solution is to use all the methods available to predict how successful the student is likely to be after matriculating, not to water down curriculum to the point where the most marginal student in the class will pass.
But universities need the tuition to support ever more bloated administrative hierarchies and salaries. Most are in a state of abject panic because international graduate enrollments (a cash cow) are way down in the past couple of years. Staff layoffs are starting to happen, which were previously almost unheard of.
No, moral is to make student loans subject to regular bankrupcy. Student should be also able to get refound, if university misrepresents or lies about their job prospects!
> No, moral is to make student loans subject to regular bankrupcy.
Aren't the issues that there is no collateral/nothing to repossess? What kind of issuer would give a 5 or 6 figure loan with no collateral and nothing to repossess?
At the same time, it's still a bad use of funds, and lenders likely wouldn't have the ability to discriminate based on likelihood of bankruptcy or success in an academic program. So it just shifts costs from the student unlikely to succeed to the lender and students likely to succeed.
>You cannot reject more than one or two students in a year
this seems absurdly low, from my experience. but i have only taught in one school, so maybe we're the outlier? i would say one to two failing students per course is the baseline, not the cap.
can you share where you are getting this number from? is that the guideline where you teach?
It's a complete national mess. You don't know what will happen in your school until you do it. Half of the country hates hard teachers, the other half loves them.
we're talking about this claim you made: "You cannot reject more than one or two students in a year"
which you appear to be basing on a high school article your ai supplied you, which is irrelevant to how many students a post-secondary institution can fail per semester.
friend, you can just say "oops, my article was about high school, my bad". no need to start being a dick.
>Are you disputing [...]
i am disputing your claim: "You cannot reject more than one or two students in a year or the school will reject you" (as i have reiterated 3 times now).
you have now morphed it into a completely different claim, which appears to be something along the lines of "you should not fail more than 30% of your class". which, for most of my classes, would be approaching 24 students i could fail. 12x your initial claim!
When I studied in Austria everyone with a high school diploma would be eligible to matriculate at Vienna University of Technology[1], but then the first semester courses would have a bunch of "knock-out" exams that would have a large chunk of first semester students fail and eventually drop out.
IMO this is "fairer" but of course it means you might lose a semester. Helps that there's barely any tuition fees.
[1] Even then (~2005) that wasn't the case for all universities though. Medical university already had entrance exams, mainly due to the high number of German students trying to enroll.
I was hired in my current role to replace one such professor who was fired because he insisted on giving a majority of his class failing grades. And honestly, it was the right call; he was being kind of unprofessional about it. He was teaching a very difficult subject -- C++ -- as an expert, and then getting mad that people weren't also experts at C++ within 3 months. So I agree that professors should have more control and authority over their classes, but also at the same time those professors who fail large swathes of their classes can be really unpleasant.
Also these are most likely the first classes. You can not block most of your entering cohort. Or even any way significant part. At least in the system these professors exist in. In some other systems like say German where getting in easy and getting rid of some is normal would be different.
This shouldn't be a hard problem to solve. At the state university I'm most familiar with, every incoming Freshman takes a math assessment test. If they don't pass it, they have to take remedial coursework (which does not count towards their degree requirements).
And yes, every student takes it, even the ones with high school AP math and high SAT math scores. The only exception might be if they have already completed and passed actual accredited university math courses for credit.
Do they not have remedial classes for these students? It's been more than 20 years, but back in my day, if you weren't ready for entry level classes (but still got in to university) you took remedial classes first.
The processes for delivering remedial classes no longer work at the scale required. UC San Diego published a detailed report of what's happening at their campus (https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...): their remedial math placement grew from 32 students in 2020 to 921 students in 2025, 665 of whom placed into an extra-remedial course covering grade 1-8 math which had not previously been needed.
It seems like the current situation means that processes need to change in a major way somewhere (maybe everywhere) but this report (and the letter) seem to be focused on doing as little as possible to get their part of the system back to the way it was. With this many students it seems like larger structural changes like a remedial year should be considered or else quickly redesign the system in other ways like reducing the focus on directly attending university after high school.
California's community college system is designed to provide the "remedial year" you propose, and this is a well-known pathway among California high school students and admissions counselors. If a high school graduate wants postsecondary education but isn't quite ready for a rigorous college curriculum, they sign up for the local community college. If they do very well, the CSUs and UCs accept and encourage transfer applications; if they find it's still not for them, then they take the associate degree and move on.
Freshman admissions at UC San Diego are for a different group. They have a 28% acceptance rate, not the most selective in the country but far from taking anyone with a pulse. The admissions office intends to reject people who doesn't know how to do basic math, letting them know that this isn't the right pathway for them, but they're not able to do that reliably without standardized tests.
Is there a shortage of students who have a grasp of elementary school math, who apply to UC?
Instead of admitting the captain of the ping-pong team (who can't count past 21 - or past ten without pulling off his boots), maybe admit any one of the students who... Did not have the extracurricular pedigree, but actually applied themselves and passed Math 12?
Surely, there's more than a few hundred of the latter in California.
You're misunderstanding the problem. It's not that the UCs are admitting a bunch of special exceptions who failed out of high school math; these are people who got decent grades and are supposed to know the material.
Well, then. In that case, the simple solution is to admit more students in the first year, and aggressively flunk out the ones whose performance does not match their high school grades.
Why is that better than just requiring the SAT, which while imperfect does a great job at weeding out students who have A’s in math but can’t solve 8th grade algebra problems.
Seems easy to explain, high schoolers were not in school from 2020-2022 in most areas, so they were two or three years behind in everything when they got to college.
A senior in highschool two or three years behind should not need extra-remedial classes for grades 1-8 maths during their first year at college, and especially not 600+ of them at once.
The system is working as designed. If they don’t want to provide remedial then they need some pre-admission test to weed them out. The students can try again later after maturing more or taking community college classes.
This is why universities have offered what amount to remedial math classes for donkey's years. Even in the early 2000's, if you showed up to Calculus I without sufficient preparation, you'd find yourself bounced to Pre-Calculus by the end of the week.
In 2005 I had to take placement tests before I could even enroll in my classes, so someone who wasn't actually ready for Calculus wouldn't get to enroll in it if they didn't pass the placement tests.
If I may assume, I think GP is alluding to the likelihood that such students are going to be minorities from poor socioeconomic backgrounds. If they are failing in large numbers, that will open the door to claims of systemic discrimination.
Tenured professors do often fail large swathes of the class, and it's not hard to stand their ground because academic freedom is still very important in universities. This is not generally true for non-tenured and adjunct professors, but for a different reason -- their job review rely on a large part on student feedback forms, and failing students are not happy students.
The idea that if only all professors stood their ground then somehow students will be motivated to study doesn't pan out in practice, though. There is already a significant number of students who are perpetually struggling. They are missing basic prerequisites, and instead of catching up on them, they repeated try and fail at learning the same materials, passing only when they got a lenient instructor. The problem compounds because failing brings helplessness and exacerbates their mental issues, which brings more failing. The university cannot sit on their high ground and watch these students struggle, especially if their number reaches a critical mass.
It's kind of like how if you owe the bank $1000, you have a problem, but if you owe a bank $100M, they have a problem. You just can't reasonably ignore a huge portion of the class as a professor without a serious amount of documentation, and proof that you've tried to escalate and solve the issue. Ultimately, people are paying for these courses, and it's probably better to teach something rather than nothing.
Sounds like people are paying for these courses is part of the actual problem, then? Students should not have any kind of entitlement whatsoever to pass classes other than merit.
Framing it as a transaction is part of the problem IMHO. We have a collective interest that the majority of the population gets the best education possible. Turning universities into credential stores leads to all the negative side effects we're dealing with - pay to play schemes, dubious credential mills, rich families bribing universities, and so on.
That's exactly what they did at my college (non-California state school) 20 years ago. Special program for students from poor high schools who otherwise wouldn't be admitted, where they came in the summer before freshman year and had to pass some prep classes first. IDK what the actual long term results were, but seems like a better idea than nothing.
Under the circumstance that the primary and secondary education levels have failed to adequately prepare a student for tertiary level, I think your idea would be unfair.
The university teaches what it teaches; it exists as a place of higher learning. If the student is unprepared for that, they are unprepared to attend. It's not university's job to fix shitty high schools' teachings and redo lower learning. Go get a highschool tutor if you need that.
If you were never taught math, that sucks, but you shouldn't be admitted to a university. That's just not what needs to be happening. Go catch up on math at your own and reapply when ready.
It's difficult to assess which students have a chance of success without standardized testing.
"In 2024, over 25% of the students in Math 2 had a math grade average of 4.0".
Math 2 is the remedial elementary and middle school math course at UC SD. Lack of standardized testing plus grade inflation contributes to this outcome.
