Opinion | UC San Diego report: Incoming students are not ready for college – The Washington Post
Opinion
Megan McArdle
The signs of educational decline are now impossible to ignore
UC San Diego report shows students are not prepared for college, especially in math.
November 23, 2025, 5 min
Some years ago, during a dinner party, our smoke detector started beeping while we were broiling steaks. I dashed into the hallway and poked at the detector with a broom, which paused, as if surprised, then resumed wailing. My husband came out of the kitchen and had a go. His more muscular attention bought us perhaps 30 seconds of relief, but the machine recovered and more aggressively assaulted our ears. Eventually we pulled the cursed thing out of its frame and ripped the batteries out.
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That’s when one of our guests said, “Guys, that’s really a lot of smoke.” It sure was, because as it turned out, our bathroom was on fire (thanks to a candle).
Life is full of these messy signals. Prices are a signal. They tell us how much people want stuff, how much that stuff costs to produce and how much of it we have available. Standardized test scores are signs, telling us whether kids have mastered certain skills. Those warnings are, like my smoke alarm, highly imperfect. (We’ve had many alerts and exactly one fire.) But they contain vital information, and we ignore them at our peril.
Unfortunately, because these signals are messy, we are often tempted to ignore them, especially when the information they contain is bad news, like “your bathroom is on fire,” or “your schools are failing to close persistent racial and income gaps,” or “regulations have made it too hard to build new housing.” Ideally you’d extinguish the fire or fix your failing schools or amend the regulations before the problem worsens. But solving problems is hard, and in politics, it often involves taking on well-organized constituencies that will wave away the smoke and insist that everything is just fine. So institutions often choose to disregard the underlying issues and simply whack the alarm with a hammer until it stops beeping.
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There has been a lot of that going on recently, most notably in education. Instead of rectifying disparities in preparation and achievement, people decided it would be simpler to adjust the measurements. Parents opposed standardized testing, got their kids disability diagnoses that allowed them extra time on tests and lobbied teachers to change bad grades. Exhausted teachers responded with grade inflation, which also helped conceal that low-income and minority kids weren’t doing as well as their richer and White peers. Progressive educators watered down curriculums, gutted gifted and talented programs, and weakened admissions standards for honors classes and magnet schools. Colleges dropped standardized testing requirements, in part because that made it easier to diversify their student body. None of these things happened everywhere, but they happened in many places, and all of them made it harder to see — or rectify — pandemic-era learning loss.
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