Gazing at vs. Bridging the Math Preparation Gap

For nearly a year, faculty groups and journalists have been gazing at a math-preparation gap for incoming college students—and fixating on a 2025 University of California San Diego faculty report that depicted a large number of incoming students as hopelessly ill prepared for college study. This distorted portrayal of students’ math readiness has emerged as exhibit 1 in a campaign to reinstate standardized tests for undergraduate admissions. 

Declines in math preparation are real and reflect deeper problems—including pandemic-induced inequities, social media’s influence on young people, and ongoing shortages of qualified math teachers. Yet the need for mathematical skills is more important than ever. Closing the gap between that need and students’ math performance should be a priority. 

Before adopting admissions policies that exclude students whose only fault is their prior lack of access to advanced math courses or high-quality instruction, UC faculty and leadership need to further examine math-preparation levels to ensure they have accurate—and complete—information. They also need to understand the full spectrum of evidence-based approaches that address the root causes of preparation gaps. 

UC has been test free since 2020, when first the pandemic, then a lawsuit, and finally a regents’ vote blocked the use of admissions tests. This year, the outcry over math preparation, including a letter signed by about 15 percent of faculty, put the question of admissions tests back on the table. The issue is currently being considered by a faculty admissions committee, whose recommendation will go to the full faculty senate in February 2027. The senate will then forward its ultimate recommendation to the Board of Regents in June 2027.  

UC San Diego is an outlier among California public higher education institutions in offering precollege remedial courses. The California State University system and the California Community Colleges both eliminated remedial courses nearly a decade ago. Around the same time, UCSD began offering a remedial math course and expanded to two remedial courses in 2024. Today, those courses constitute nearly 80 percent of remedial enrollments at all nine undergraduate UC campuses. 

In deciding how to move forward, system leaders should not accept the UCSD report at face value. The report misrepresents the state of math preparation by failing to disclose multiple factors that contributed to the disproportionate increase in UCSD’s remedial enrollment numbers. For example, the campus raised the threshold for placement into precalculus and disallowed calculators on the placement exam. Either of those changes would have increased remedial placements even if students’ actual preparation level had not changed. 

The lack of transparency and UCSD’s outlier status make the campus a poor reference point for understanding and measuring students’ math performance or setting statewide policy.

The faculty and the regents should consider strategies that have been implemented successfully—at UC campuses as well as at less selective colleges. For example, Cuyamaca College in San Diego County, which sends transfer students to UCSD every year, places the vast majority of STEM-bound students directly into calculus with corequisite support, as Tammi Marshall details in our “Voices on Math Readiness” series. By contrast, UCSD students can take up to four math courses (including two precollege remedial courses) before reaching calculus. 

Beyond San Diego, K–12 and higher education systems across the state have broadened their approach to math preparation and successfully bridged the gap between students’ mathematical proficiency and the math skills they need for higher education and modern careers. The “Voices on Math Readiness” series highlights several examples, showing:

• How placement tests and remedial sequences can create “math traps,” as explained by Federick Ngo of the University of Southern California.
• How placement reforms can allow more students to access the college-level math courses where they can best succeed, as Jesús Oliver and Sagar Shah of California State University, East Bay underscored. 
• Why raising expectations for all students can boost college preparedness, whether it is by increasing enrollment in college-preparatory A–G courses, as Jorge Torres of Compton Unified School District documented, or by expanding access to college-level courses for high school students through dual enrollment, as Sherrie Reed and Michal Kurlaender of University of California, Davis illustrated. 
• How learning rigorous mathematics and statistics in contexts that are relevant for students—such as hiphop music, food deserts, and mental health—can make math education more inclusive and equitable, as Babette Benken and Kagba Suaray of California State University, Long Beach and Roberto Rubalcaba of San Diego City College emphasized.

At the September regents’ meeting, we also heard how redesigning calculus into a Mathematics for Life Scientists course focused on modeling dynamical biological systems has improved outcomes for UCLA biology students. 

These examples illustrate the importance of examining empirical evidence and building interventions that deliver on the promise of math education to unlock opportunity for all students.

Calls to return to standardized admissions testing do neither. In fact, as UC Berkeley economist Jesse Rothstein notes in a recent policy brief, using SAT scores in college admissions negatively affects high-achieving students from historically underrepresented groups, students from families with a low socioeconomic status, and students with disabilities. 

Viewing math preparation through the singular lens of selective university admissions is both myopic and misguided, as Akil Bello stressed in the lead-off commentary for the “Voices on Math Readiness” series. UC leaders should not repeat that mistake.