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The New Cliff Facing Higher Ed and How AI Might Help Solve It
There is a new “cliff” in American higher education, and it is not the demographic cliff. Rather, it is the dramatic cliff in math knowledge, skills and abilities.
Let me be clear that other discipline deficiencies are found in this new generation of college students, however they are dwarfed by those in math. These have most recentlly been quantified in a report from the University of California San Diego. The official "Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions Final Report" (released November 6, 2025) which contains these findings. This widely discussed report revealed that nearly one in eight incoming freshmen couldn't meet middle school math standards!
Key Findings
Significant Increase in Remediation Needs: Between 2020 and 2025, the number of freshmen at UCSD with math skills below a middle-school level increased nearly thirtyfold. Roughly one in eight incoming students now requires remedial education in math.
High School Grades Are Not Correlated with Proficiency: The report found that many students with strong high school math GPAs (e.g., a 4.0 average) still placed into remedial courses designed for middle school-level material, indicating that grades are no longer a reliable measure of actual skill.
Widespread Problem: The issue is not isolated to one institution. Reports from other universities, such as George Mason University, also describe college students struggling with basic math concepts, even those in pre-calculus and calculus courses.
Systemic Issues: The decline is part of a longer-term trend exacerbated by the pandemic and is prompting calls for greater accountability in the K-12 education system and for a re-evaluation of admissions standards, such as developing a "Math Index" to better assess preparedness.
Impact on Higher Education: The increased need for remedial courses strains university resources and risks "setting them up for failure". Higher education institutions are having to create new, basic courses to address fundamental knowledge gaps that in previous years were assumed to be covered in high school.
This is not just at UCSD or California, in an Associated Report carried by CNN titled “US high school students lose ground in math and reading, continuing yearslong decline,” there is evidence that the decline may be originally seated in the COVID-19 pandemic which forced students out of their schools and into homes and day care centers.
A decade-long slide in high schoolers’ reading and math performance persisted during the COVID-19 pandemic, with 12th graders’ scores dropping to their lowest level in more than 20 years, according to results released Tuesday from an exam known as the nation’s report card.
Eighth-grade students also lost significant ground in science skills, according to the results from the National Assessment of Education Progress.
The assessments were the first since the pandemic for eighth graders in science and 12th graders in reading and math. They reflect a downward drift across grade levels and subject areas in previous releases from NAEP, which is considered one of the best gauges of the academic progress of U.S. schools.
‘Scores for our lowest-performing students are at historic lows,’ said Matthew Soldner, the acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. ‘These results should galvanize all of us to take concerted and focused action to accelerate student learning.’
Is this the moment where AI-driven adaptive learning and "agentic" AI tutors move from "nice to have" to "institutional survival mechanism"?
We’ve talked about AI for cheating or essay writing, but its ability to scale remediation for the "Covid generation" of students (who are now hitting college) might be its killer app.
Question to explore: Can online remediation save the STEM pipeline, or are we just automating the acknowledgement of a gap we can't close?
https://taaft.notion.site/Muti-Mode-Learning-System-2aced82cbfd380f28f6bf772f2471b21
Online: Trending Now: https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/blogs/online-trending-now
Link to Unanticipated presentation: https://sites.google.com/view/unanticipated/home/
Link to Ray's EduAI Advisor: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-pLDOh2PHk-ray-s-eduai-advisor
Link to Ray Schroeder Brief CV https://bit.ly/44ZHlu9