10/03/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/1DsrvfSBMx/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Professors at UC Berkeley have been raising concerns about students arriving on campus without the mathematical foundations expected for college-level work.
And some of the gaps aren't small.
Faculty have described students struggling with material normally learned years earlier, including fractions and basic algebra. Berkeley has even introduced additional foundational math instruction to help students who aren't ready for the courses their college education requires.
But this raises a much bigger question about what happens BEFORE college.
How does a student move through middle school and high school, earn passing grades, graduate, and gain admission to a highly selective university while still carrying significant gaps in fundamental math?
At some point, we have to ask whether moving students forward is being confused with actually preparing them to move forward.
Grades should mean something.
A diploma should mean something.
Completing a course should mean a student has demonstrated a reasonable understanding of what that course was supposed to teach.
Because when gaps are repeatedly carried into the next grade, they don't disappear.
They compound.
And eventually, someone has to confront them.
This isn't about blaming students or individual teachers. There are serious questions about pandemic learning loss, grading practices, curriculum, attendance, technology, academic integrity, support at home, and whether schools have enough freedom and resources to intervene when students fall behind.
But whatever the causes, universities shouldn't be the first place we discover that a student never mastered the fundamentals.
Something has gone seriously wrong when students can reach college before anyone addresses gaps in basic math.
If students can progress all the way from middle school to college without mastering basic math, where is the system failing to catch them, and why is it happening?
