The University of California, San Diego is confronting an academic breakdown that would have been unthinkable a decade ago: a growing share of its incoming freshmen now arrive on campus unable to perform middle-school mathematics. Though it’s shocking, it shouldn’t be surprising, given how public education from kindergarten through college has shifted its focus from the fundamentals of the ABCs and 123s to the ideology of DEI.
Internal faculty reports show that roughly one in eight UCSD freshmen now requires remedial math, and nearly 10 percent are so underprepared that even standard remedial courses are too advanced, forcing the university to redesign classes to cover elementary arithmetic and fractions.
The problem is especially striking given UCSD’s status as the sixth-ranked public university in the nation, according to U.S. News & World Report, making it more selective than many of its sister institutions.
Faculty data reviewed by UCSD’s Academic Senate indicate that the surge in remediation followed the loosening of standardized testing requirements and a shift away from mastery-based instruction in California high schools. That decline coincided with broader changes in K–12 classrooms, where instructional time has increasingly been redirected toward identity-based curricula rooted in Critical Race Theory frameworks, often at the expense of sustained instruction in math, reading, and analytical reasoning.
The UCSD math collapse reflects a pipeline failure years in the making and shows how universities have failed to set the appropriate standards for our education system as a whole.
A recent policy report by the Goldwater Institute found that universities nationwide—including campuses across the University of California system—now spend billions of dollars annually on diversity, equity, and inclusion programming, even as academic expectations decline and remedial instruction expands. Many institutions mandate DEI coursework for graduation while quietly lowering standards in the core subjects that students need to succeed in life.
The same pattern is true for California’s K–12 system, where critics have long warned about the long-term repercussions of this shift. In one investigation by the Goldwater Institute, a California teacher, Kali Fontanilla, described classrooms where students were sorted by race and social identity for discussion exercises. Instruction in math and reading has been deprioritized, with her school rewarding social justice fluency over academic competence. Beginning with the class of 2030, all public high school students in California will be required to complete an “ethnic studies” course, which Fontanilla says will institutionalize “extreme left brainwashing.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. After pioneering education savings accounts—empowering millions of families to obtain better schooling for their children—the Goldwater Institute has advanced a set of reforms aimed at reversing this decline and restoring academic rigor to public education at every level. The quickest way to make schools teach the basics is to require them to reveal what is being taught in the first place. Parents deserve to see what happens in classrooms instead of discovering ideological content only after academic standards have collapsed. Goldwater’s Academic Transparency Act would require public schools to disclose their instructional materials and classroom activities on a publicly available website, restoring parental oversight and promoting accountability.
Higher education is not blameless for the deterioration of our education system. At public universities, the Goldwater Institute has moved to dismantle sprawling DEI bureaucracies that drain resources from teaching and research, impose ideological litmus tests on faculty, and require students to complete DEI coursework to graduate. Goldwater’s Freedom From Indoctrination Act would prohibit public universities from mandating DEI or Critical Race Theory courses as a condition of graduation and bar administrators from enforcing ideological requirements through faculty syllabi or performance evaluations. By restoring academic freedom and strengthening First Amendment protections, the law reasserts the university’s core mission as a place of open inquiry rather than enforced ideological conformity.
At UCSD, the downstream consequences are now unmistakable. The university is attempting to compensate for years of lost instruction that occurred long before students arrived on campus. Unless priorities shift—toward transparency, foundational skills, and the protection of free speech over ideological orthodoxy—UCSD’s math crisis may soon look less like an anomaly and more like the predictable outcome of an education system that has chosen identity politics over reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Carl Paulus is a Senior Writer for the Goldwater Institute.
