College Math Readiness Is a Problem Worth Solving

Late last year, an internal report at the University of California, San Diego triggered nationwide alarm about the growing number of students deemed not ready for college-level math. 

The report struck a nerve, capturing the attention of opinion writers and politicians—even leading to a U.S. Senate inquiry—by insinuating that selective colleges were admitting unqualified students. In fact, even though the report centered on about 1,000 entering students at a single university, it garnered far more notice from editorial boards than the announcement of falling scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, test—a barometer for students across the country—two months earlier. 

As someone who has worked to expand math opportunities for years, the report seemed like a snapshot taken with a pinhole camera, incomplete and distorted. The picture suggested quick fixes such as changing admissions policies. And right on cue, we saw a group of University of California faculty demand a return to standardized testing. This playbook might work well for garnering headlines, but to actually confront the very real challenge our K–12 and higher education systems face today requires understanding the trend in depth and in context. 

We need a wider aperture. 

That’s because math preparation affects an entire generation of students across the country. Addressing it involves not just universities, but also school systems, math disciplinary societies, classroom instructors, assessment systems, and of course students and their families. 

From that broader, societal perspective, regardless of what elite universities such as UCSD do, it is not possible to wish the challenge away by choosing a different set of students. 

There is little question that the best-prepared students are the easiest to teach. But as the late higher education researcher Alexander Astin observed about universities: 

"We value bring smart much more than we do developing smartness. We forget that our institutions’ primary mission is to expand students’ intellectual capacities, not merely to select and certify those whose intellectual talents are already well developed by the time they reach us. This preoccupation with smartness is also the reason that we continue to support a grading system and a standardized-testing industry that are geared to ranking and rating students rather than to assessing how much they are actually learning."

Astin’s comments ring true when it comes to math education, where there is a heavy emphasis on test scores as well as policies that route students into higher or lower math tracks beginning in middle school or even earlier. The architecture of math opportunity is undergirded in the assumption that only some people can do math, scaffolded by preexisting inequities and stereotypes, and reinforced by math’s use as a pedigree that confers access to so many other opportunities. 

The “Voices on Math Readiness” series is designed to deepen understanding of math preparation by uplifting the perspectives of those who are doing the daily work of fostering and improving math learning for all students. Because we know that math skills are central to students’ educational and life opportunities.

This series of commentaries is not meant to be an exhaustive accounting of every aspect of college math preparation. Rather, it aims to bring to life various perspectives on what it means to do and learn math in 2026 and beyond. Whether it is rethinking placement practices, updating curriculum for the 21st century, or better supporting students to succeed in advanced courses, the authors invite readers to consider innovative approaches to fostering quantitative readiness in the 21st century. 

The crucial issues raised by UCSD’s report—and an urge to reframe the narrative to focus on expanding, rather than limiting, students’ math horizons—inspired this series. As I wrote in an EdSource op-ed soon after that report’s release, we need greater collaboration between high schools and colleges, as well as other structural changes to our system of math education, to address issues of preparation. That piece sparked numerous colleagues—including some of the series authors—to reach out and say that they, too, were eager to weigh in on an aspect of the issue they felt had been overlooked. 

We’re excited to feature these voices of researchers, advocates, educators, and students. We hope the series will lead readers to question and reflect on the assumptions they bring to the question of math readiness and to consider new approaches.

The stakes are high, as math skills will power the students’—and our collective—future.