First, that's UCSD, not UC Davis. They mention UC Davis in the report, but the 8.5% refers to UCSD.

Secondly, mastering high school math is genuinely difficult these days. I'm a math major, I've made it through my calc courses and differential equations, but I found Algebra 2 legitimately hard. Logarithms and Trigonometric functions are counterintuitive, and not everybody is at their peak ability to buckle down and grind through things when they're struggling at age 17.

And lastly, this is pretty obviously at least in part a knock-on affect of covid, hence the extremely recent major spike. I'm not sure it's worth generalizing from "UC San Diego Students admitted in the last couple of years are struggling with high school math (because they were in high school during lockdown)" to "We shouldn't try paying mechanics more because everyone's bad at math"

From the report:

  While Math 2 was designed in 2016 to remediate missing high school math knowledge, now most students had knowledge gaps that went back much further, to middle and even elementary school. To address the large number of underprepared students, the Mathematics Department redesigned Math 2 for Fall 2024 to focus entirely on elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects (grades 1-8), and introduced a new course, Math 3B, so as to cover missing high-school common core math subjects (Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II or Math I, II, III; grades 9-11).

So actually I was wrong. I should have said:

- 11.8% of UCSD freshmen haven't mastered high school math

- 8.5% haven't mastered middle school math

These folks may have had some disruption during the last year of middle school, and the first year of high school. But does that fully explain why they haven't mastered middle school math or, in some cases, elementary school math?

The comment to which I responded quibbled with mhb saying "We used to be able to assume that high school and college graduates could do elementary school math."

It's clear from the report I linked that we cannot assume that high school graduates can do elementary school math.

> It's clear from the report I linked that we cannot assume that high school graduates can do elementary school math.

Well, I wouldn't necessarily assume that 100% of anyone with a degree has mastered what the degree is for. So to me the takeaway is that ~90% have mastered the math. And so in terms of the original comment, not necessarily do we need them all to go to undergraduate.

UCSD freshmen aren't a random sample of high school graduates.

But I don't think college is the best place for remedial math classes.

> Trigonometric functions are counterintuitive

Machinists use trig.

Sure. They're usually not sophomore students.