Over_ed said:

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doubledog said:

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The university rating game is more or less subjective to the raters. TAMU rarely breaks the top 10 (overall) due to its relatively weak liberal arts program (thus the recent merging of liberal arts and sciences at TAMU) and the impact it has on the rating game. As proof: TAMU consistently ranks in the top 10 in sciences, agriculture and engineering.

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Yep. And I admit I have a bias (business, engineering/tech/stat) degrees.

But, at this point is a strong Liberal Arts program an asset for a University? My answer is no.

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The basic story is that the education reform movement spearheaded by George W. Bush, which focused on improving test scores, collapsed in the mid-2010s. After that, public schools across the country began to lower their standards passing kids who didn't know the material, making their curricula a lot easier, etc. Often, kids just skip class entirely in Oregon, around a third of all schoolchildren are chronically absent from school.

This was sometimes done in the name of "equity" even though the new lax policies lead to widening racial and gender gaps. The rise of phones in schools probably exacerbated the trend, as did the pandemic, but the fundamental cause is lax standards everywhere.

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K2-HMFIC said:

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https://substack.com/@noahpinion/note/p-179897140?r=1q05vy&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

Noah Smith just wrote a piece on this as well.

Quote:

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The basic story is that the education reform movement spearheaded by George W. Bush, which focused on improving test scores, collapsed in the mid-2010s. After that, public schools across the country began to lower their standards passing kids who didn't know the material, making their curricula a lot easier, etc. Often, kids just skip class entirely in Oregon, around a third of all schoolchildren are chronically absent from school.

This was sometimes done in the name of "equity" even though the new lax policies lead to widening racial and gender gaps. The rise of phones in schools probably exacerbated the trend, as did the pandemic, but the fundamental cause is lax standards everywhere.

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Over_ed said:

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doubledog said:

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The university rating game is more or less subjective to the raters. TAMU rarely breaks the top 10 (overall) due to its relatively weak liberal arts program (thus the recent merging of liberal arts and sciences at TAMU) and the impact it has on the rating game. As proof: TAMU consistently ranks in the top 10 in sciences, agriculture and engineering.

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Yep. And I admit I have a bias (business, engineering/tech/stat) degrees.

But, at this point is a strong Liberal Arts program an asset for a University? My answer is no.

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Over_ed said:

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K2-HMFIC said:

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https://substack.com/@noahpinion/note/p-179897140?r=1q05vy&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

Noah Smith just wrote a piece on this as well.

Quote:

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The basic story is that the education reform movement spearheaded by George W. Bush, which focused on improving test scores, collapsed in the mid-2010s. After that, public schools across the country began to lower their standards passing kids who didn't know the material, making their curricula a lot easier, etc. Often, kids just skip class entirely in Oregon, around a third of all schoolchildren are chronically absent from school.

This was sometimes done in the name of "equity" even though the new lax policies lead to widening racial and gender gaps. The rise of phones in schools probably exacerbated the trend, as did the pandemic, but the fundamental cause is lax standards everywhere.

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Good friend, pretty senior prof at one of the local Community Colleges. She was planning to work another 5 years, now looking to quit next year. She can't in good conscience pass as many as her administration demands.

Realize this sounds like "Old Man Yelling at Sky" but this is becoming an unsolvable problem. The dudes in San Diego can reinstitute SAT, but that will be a temporary patch.

Too many parents just don't see their kids' education as their responsibility. And Universities will do whatever it takes at some point to keep kids (and tuition) flowing.

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Over_ed said:

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Good friend, pretty senior prof at one of the local Community Colleges. She was planning to work another 5 years, now looking to quit next year. She can't in good conscience pass as many as her administration demands.

Realize this sounds like "Old Man Yelling at Sky" but this is becoming an unsolvable problem. The dudes in San Diego can reinstitute SAT, but that will be a temporary patch.

Too many parents just don't see their kids' education as their responsibility. And Universities will do whatever it takes at some point to keep kids (and tuition) flowing.

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Over_ed said:

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K2-HMFIC said:

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https://substack.com/@noahpinion/note/p-179897140?r=1q05vy&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

Noah Smith just wrote a piece on this as well.

Quote:

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The basic story is that the education reform movement spearheaded by George W. Bush, which focused on improving test scores, collapsed in the mid-2010s. After that, public schools across the country began to lower their standards passing kids who didn't know the material, making their curricula a lot easier, etc. Often, kids just skip class entirely in Oregon, around a third of all schoolchildren are chronically absent from school.

This was sometimes done in the name of "equity" even though the new lax policies lead to widening racial and gender gaps. The rise of phones in schools probably exacerbated the trend, as did the pandemic, but the fundamental cause is lax standards everywhere.

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Good friend, pretty senior prof at one of the local Community Colleges. She was planning to work another 5 years, now looking to quit next year. She can't in good conscience pass as many as her administration demands.

Realize this sounds like "Old Man Yelling at Sky" but this is becoming an unsolvable problem. The dudes in San Diego can reinstitute SAT, but that will be a temporary patch.

Too many parents just don't see their kids' education as their responsibility. And Universities will do whatever it takes at some point to keep kids (and tuition) flowing.

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K2-HMFIC said:

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https://substack.com/@noahpinion/note/p-179897140?r=1q05vy&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

Noah Smith just wrote a piece on this as well.

Quote:

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The basic story is that the education reform movement spearheaded by George W. Bush, which focused on improving test scores, collapsed in the mid-2010s. After that, public schools across the country began to lower their standards passing kids who didn't know the material, making their curricula a lot easier, etc. Often, kids just skip class entirely in Oregon, around a third of all schoolchildren are chronically absent from school.

This was sometimes done in the name of "equity" even though the new lax policies lead to widening racial and gender gaps. The rise of phones in schools probably exacerbated the trend, as did the pandemic, but the fundamental cause is lax standards everywhere.

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This UCSD math proficiency scandal reminds me of the great financial crisis in 2008. There was an assumption then, that bundled mortgages are nearly risk-free investments. This led to banks being incentivized to underwrite more mortgages, so they started handing out "NINJA" loans (No Income, No Job / Assets). This radical shift in the distribution of who got loans caused the initial assumption to break.

It's similar here: there's a base assumption that a UC diploma leads to better salaries, so the more we give to lower-income folks, we lift more young people out of poverty and that's a good thing. But if you start handing these diplomas out to larger numbers of students who can't do elementary school math, employers will notice and the base assumption will break.

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This UCSD math proficiency scandal reminds me of the great financial crisis in 2008. There was an assumption then, that bundled mortgages are nearly risk-free investments. This led to banks being incentivized to underwrite more mortgages, so they started handing out "NINJA" loans…

— Jelani Nelson (@minilek) November 24, 2025

doubledog said:

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The university rating game is more or less subjective to the raters. TAMU rarely breaks the top 10 (overall) due to its relatively weak liberal arts program (thus the recent merging of liberal arts and sciences at TAMU) and the impact it has on the rating game. As proof: TAMU consistently ranks in the top 10 in sciences, agriculture, buisness and engineering.

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doubledog said:

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Over_ed said:

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doubledog said:

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The university rating game is more or less subjective to the raters. TAMU rarely breaks the top 10 (overall) due to its relatively weak liberal arts program (thus the recent merging of liberal arts and sciences at TAMU) and the impact it has on the rating game. As proof: TAMU consistently ranks in the top 10 in sciences, agriculture and engineering.

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Yep. And I admit I have a bias (business, engineering/tech/stat) degrees.

But, at this point is a strong Liberal Arts program an asset for a University? My answer is no.

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This is why ranking universities is a "game". Most rankers are media professionals (liberal arts). Two other ranking factor that weighs against TAMU and t.u. is their student/faculty ratio and their "reputation". The "reputation" factor is very subjective and is very much part of the game.

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Our ranking measures how well each college sets graduates up for financial success. We look at how much a school improves students' chances of graduating and their future earnings, balancing these outcomes with feedback from students on college life. We don't measure reputation, nor the college's own finances.
Public schools are prominent among those that climbed the ranking this year, with two in the top 10the University of California, Berkeley at No. 8 and the Georgia Institute of Technology at No. 9and six in the top 20. No public school was in the top 10 last year and only two were in the top 20.
Schools with strong tech or business programs also fared well, including No. 2 Babson College and No. 3 Stanford University. Stanford is one of 17 California colleges in the top 50, up from six last year and by the far the most for any state.

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AGinHI said:

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I'm concerned when I'm my parents age (80's) that doctors are going to be arrogant dolts and as I'm closing out the chapter on mortality and things are just breaking down, despite my personal efforts, the only people I will have to deal with for medical help will be white supremacy indoctrinated morons.

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Get Off My Lawn said:

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Over_ed said:

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doubledog said:

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The university rating game is more or less subjective to the raters. TAMU rarely breaks the top 10 (overall) due to its relatively weak liberal arts program (thus the recent merging of liberal arts and sciences at TAMU) and the impact it has on the rating game. As proof: TAMU consistently ranks in the top 10 in sciences, agriculture and engineering.

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Yep. And I admit I have a bias (business, engineering/tech/stat) degrees.

But, at this point is a strong Liberal Arts program an asset for a University? My answer is no.

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User name fits… potentially? Depends on whether you're over educated, over education, over Edward, or over erectile disorder. Congrats, regardless, I guess!

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ts5641 said:

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Has there ever been a great indicator we're plowing full steam ahead toward Idiocracy? An "elite" university has a chunk of students who can't do middle school math. Unreal.

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A recent internal Harvard report found that more than 60% of grades given to undergraduates in the 2024-25 academic year were A'sup from about 25% two decades ago. The median grade-point average at graduation, which was 3.29 in 1985, is now 3.83. Since 2016 the median GPA at Harvard has been an A, even though the number of hours that students say they spend studying has remained relatively unchanged for close to 20 years.

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Predictably, Harvard students were none too pleased with these findings. One person described the report as "soul-crushing," according to the Harvard Crimson. Another argued that stricter academic standards would be a threat to students' mental health. Others insisted that grading was already too harsh. "I can't reach my maximum level of enjoyment just learning the material because I'm so anxious about the midterm, so anxious about the papers, and because I know it's so harshly graded," one freshman explained. "If that standard is raised even more, it's unrealistic to assume that people will enjoy their classes."

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A 2023 report from Yale found that nearly 80% of grades given to its undergraduates were A's or A-minuses. Lighter grading standards during the pandemic didn't help matters, but the trend predates Covid and isn't confined to our prestige institutions. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, between 1990 and 2020, the median college GPA rose by 21.5%. The largest increase (17%) came at public four-year institutions, not Ivy League schools.

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The dilution of standards is no less a concern in graduate schools, where worry about racial and ethnic balance in outcomes has become more important than competency. Step 1 of the three-part licensure exam given to medical students to measure their basic grasp of anatomy, biology and other science used to be graded using a numerical score. In 2019 the medical groups who oversee the exam voted to change the grading of Step 1 to pass/fail.

"The solution to the fact that white students score better on the exam was to eliminate reporting scores," wrote Stanley Goldfarb, a former associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. "This makes about as much sense as Major League Baseball eliminating batting averages to ensure that no ethnic cohort outperforms the others."

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Serotonin said:

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Steve Sailer has written a lot about this, including two years ago as the changes were being implemented. Here is a recent piece:
https://www.stevesailer.net/p/uc-san-diego-shoots-itself-in-the

He also linked to this excellent summary of the situation:

Quote:

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This UCSD math proficiency scandal reminds me of the great financial crisis in 2008. There was an assumption then, that bundled mortgages are nearly risk-free investments. This led to banks being incentivized to underwrite more mortgages, so they started handing out "NINJA" loans (No Income, No Job / Assets). This radical shift in the distribution of who got loans caused the initial assumption to break.

It's similar here: there's a base assumption that a UC diploma leads to better salaries, so the more we give to lower-income folks, we lift more young people out of poverty and that's a good thing. But if you start handing these diplomas out to larger numbers of students who can't do elementary school math, employers will notice and the base assumption will break.

---

This UCSD math proficiency scandal reminds me of the great financial crisis in 2008. There was an assumption then, that bundled mortgages are nearly risk-free investments. This led to banks being incentivized to underwrite more mortgages, so they started handing out "NINJA" loans…

— Jelani Nelson (@minilek) November 24, 2025

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aggiehawg said:

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Over reliance on calculators. When I was in HS, never could use calculators in any math class, ever.

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Over_ed said:

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US News and World Report ranks UC San Diego as the 6th best public university - ahead of A&M and t.u. TBH, I want to laugh when the top schools are all liberal cesspools where the average grade is an "A", but that is for another post.

In any case, those conservative (Fascist is really more appropriate) Faculty at UCSD are upset because students can't do math. Like 900 incoming freshmen cannot do math at the MIDDLE SCHOOL level. 900 is about 1/8th of the freshman class

• Only 87% of incoming freshmen could do a first-grade math problem.
• Only 19% could solve an 8th grade fractions problem.

This is a school where many students have AP calculus credits.
Nope, it's not a story from the Bee.

So anyway, these reactionary, Faculty opposers of all things fair and right, are talking about bringing back the SAT test and setting minimum cut-offs. They got rid of the SAT because it unfairly disadvantaged the "usual" groups. And I suspect they see the writing on the wall - things aren't going to get better with students using AI.

I am very glad that such a thing can't happen at Texas flagship institutions like A&M and t.u.

Admitting students based purely on HS grades would be really stupid, wouldn't it?

the full faculty report: https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissions-review-docs.pdf

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