What happens when even college students can't do math anymore?
Mood
thoughtful
Sentiment
negative
Category
culture
Key topics
education
math literacy
generational decline
The story raises concerns about the declining math abilities of college students, sparking a discussion about the potential consequences and underlying causes.
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- 01Story posted
11/19/2025, 2:05:21 PM
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11/19/2025, 2:05:47 PM
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11/19/2025, 3:24:24 PM
4h ago
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> For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment.
Good grief. No, it's just the pandemic. The kids whose middle school years got disrupted are behind on skills taught in middle school.
Can you squint and blame other things? Sure. But experimental education policies are hardly new ideas, and none of the nonsense from previous decades has shown an effect like this. If you want to show up to the game with a claim that it's some other effect, I want to see a big exposition of why it's not the obvious hypothesis at work.
It's covid, folks. And over the next 3-4 years the scores will bounce back (to much crowing in the media from whichever faction wants to claim credit). Write it down.
Ah, their next article should be about the confidence of fools...
> But the national trend is very clear: America’s students are getting much worse at math. The decline started about a decade ago and sharply accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic.
So I, a "fool", read that and think: Hm... well if the article isn't giving numbers I'm going to take the "sharp acceleration" as a statement about magnitude and clearly infer that the pandemic is at fault.
Again, is the subject complicated? Sure. But education policy doesn't produce effects like this. It never has, probably never will, and the article even doesn't claim it does.
You know what does produce effects like this? Keeping 13-year-olds out of class for two years.
I mean, come on. I repeat: write it down, in 4 years we'll all be reading about the miracle of American education policy. And that will be wrong too.
how else do they gauge someone's math ability then?
It’s not a niche ideology, sadly. It’s going mainstream. A core part of Zohran Mamdani’s platform was his goal to phase out gifted education programs, for example.
It does appear to be reversing a little bit in some places as schools realize they were fooled by people pushing ideology over data and results, but it’s going to take a while.
For those who aren’t in the loop: There’s an ideological push to eliminate testing, aptitude tests, and even to eliminate different educational tracks (accelerated learning programs, AP classes, advanced math tracts) in the name of pursuing equality for everyone. The idea of testing people for aptitude or allowing some students to go into more advanced classes than others is not allowed by some ideologically-driven people who think all students must be given strictly equal education at every grade level.
> people pushing ideology
University Education programs and as a result teaching bodies have been taken over by ideology.
I believe it is in part because all the teaching low hanging fruit has been established for centuries. So the only 'novel' things the programs can do is talk about discrimination, disparate outcomes and hand-wavey ideas about improving education. The departments have some of the lowest bars for academic professorship and as a result, the quality of research is similarly bad -> terrible.
The war on phonics is the canonical example.
The fault doesn't lie with 'people'. The above mentioned institutions are squarely at fault for making education ideological, and they should explicitly be blamed for the deterioration in student performance.
The only other option is for college administrators to be disturbingly stupid.
https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge...
But we should keep trying to give more opportunities to the less fortunate. Better education, remedial classes, free school lunches, child credits, etc. We do that by asking the wealthy to contribute more. Not by taking away their advantages.(e.g. Admission tests)
I think the answer is Boeing
A key component was the move of corporate HQ and power base from Seattle to Chicago where the execs lived, wrestling it away from the engineers in Seattle. Later they moved their HQ again to Washington DC to be closer to lobbying!
In the day job, how many people have to use maths skills beyond arithmetic?
What about trigonometry?
Differential equations?
Integration and calculus?
To be honest, if I am using Boolean Logic then that might as well be 'advanced mathematics', far beyond the comprehension of non-coders. Even simple trigonometry isn't so simple to most people.
Clearly we need some people on the planet able to do more than basic arithmetic, however, what is the point in trying to teach the whole population how to do differential equations given the lack of workplace opportunities to use such knowledge?
The why question isn't explained with maths beyond the theoretical 'yep, you will earn more'. Too many maths textbooks are utterly abstract, you might as well be learning cuneiform for the amount of practical use cases.
It seems to me that the policy makers and journalists that complain about the demise of maths skills aren't doing a lot of maths themselves yet they want to force maths on the masses, as if it was good for you in a 'eat your greens' type of way.
Maths is hard and it really does not suit a lot of people. Fluency in maths is only attainable by a few, the majority that can do maths need a lot of armbands, whether that be calculators, text books or internet crib sheets. Then there is everyone else, not even floundering, just giving it a miss.
Rather than forcing the entire population to be maths geniuses, which will never happen, maths needs to be a specialist subject chosen by those that know what it can be used for, and with ambitions to take a career path where maths happens.
Now tell me, without differential equations: * how it deforms at impact? * how much more or less air resistance it has and how it depends on speed? * how quickly solar panels can charge the battery given that charging speed is non-linear?
So you’ll end up building countless prototypes and crash them, run at different speeds and charge with different panels and battery types. 100 years later you find out that its shape is just not good.
In the meantime solving few simple differential equations and optimization problems would tell you the same.
Or something very close to programming. How do you add two empirically measured probability distributions describing how two teams perform?
A lot. It's also pretty funny that your examples of useless math are 3 of the most concrete and directly applicable concepts in the entire set of human knowledge. Try, idk, ergodic Ramsey Theory next time.
> What about trigonometry?
Ever heard about FM radio? Or anything that takes a Fourier series? Anything using complex numbers? Game programming? Graphics? Positional encodings in large language models?
> Differential equations?
My brother in christ, literally Newton's second law.
> Integration and calculus?
Ever needed to numerically find the minimum of a function or solve an equation? Newton-Raphson? Literally all of machine learning?
The thing with math is that if you aren't familiar with the concepts then you don't know what you don't know.
My weird take is this: calculus and other sorts of advanced mathematics are cultural artifacts as much as they are tools and people should be exposed to them more or less for the same reasons that we are exposed to Shakespeare or the history of world religions: they are beautiful, and learning them changes us in positive ways.
One thing I've learned after most of a lifetime being smart is that being smart barely matters. It doesn't matter whether people are good at math or bad at it or smart. Most people never achieve fluency in most subjects. But children deserve to be taught math as a matter of basic dignity and eudemonia. The attitude that education is a pragmatic thing meant to achieve some end other than enrichment of the person is why the US is so fucked.
I unfortunately have to upvote this.
Years ago when I was working in education (Canadian public schools) our school board had a conference ahead of the school year. The keynote was an inclusive-ed researcher / consultant / speaker who told an anecdote of how they had successfully lobbied for a student with a substantive intellectual disability to be registered for the high school physics courses.
Part of the anecdote was pushback from the physics head: "I've known Jake for years. Great kid. But what is he supposed to get out of physics class?"
The consultant's in-anecdote response: "what is anybody supposed to get out of physics class?"
Wild laughter and applause.
---
A surprising number of people in education seem to simply not know that there is substantive and consequential content in the curriculum.
Having never really learned math, they've never really used it. Having never used it, they don't recognize its utility.
They seem to earnestly believe that it isn't an actual tool but a gatekeeping mechanism devised by autistic persons to humiliate normies.
it should be that, though.
In time, most figure out people create pet mathematical fictions regardless of background, and while authoritative confident liars often allow people to feel better about uncertainty... it adds little value in the long-term. =3
I'm sure if I walk around in the office and ask people a problem like "Car A starts driving south at time zero, with speed 30km/h. Car B is located 10 km down south and starts driving north 5 minutes later, at speed 45 km/h, at what time do they meet? You have 1 minute. Go." a bunch of them will start to sweat, and many will likely fail - even though they have graduate STEM degrees.
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