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.
