This is an accurate description of what my large R1 research university did after Covid to maintain enrollment. It’s a heavily tuition driven place without the tens of billions of endowment dollars an Ivy has.

They “opened the floodgates” to students to maintain enrollment, in the words of a colleague. People who would have been denied without a second thought pre-COVID were admitted. The acceptance rate went from 40%-50% to 80%+. (Numbers are approximate.)

Accepting these students required adding two levels (at least!) of remedial math below what used to be the absolute last resort, “should you really be in college?” remedial math class we had pre covid. These new classes basically taught middle school level material or lower.

Nearly all of the students taking those classes don’t belong in college bc they are totally unqualified to do college level work. It’s irresponsible to admit them, charge them $200,000, then graduate them as heavily indebted but basically high school educated adults. They have no skills.

I can’t make up for their failure to learn math in (as this author correctly says) 5th - 12th grade.

I make this comment to note that the situation hasn’t changed.

Also: to the extent that anyone is looking for villains on student debt (overall the “crisis” is overblown but there absolutely are students who get screwed), blame the universities which admit unqualified students and also the high schools and middle schools which utterly failed them.

Also blame our failure to pay math teachers more than PE teachers. There are a lot of villains. The system is horrible.

Some research:

Students learn and understand college math more when the classes are contextualized (usually engineering, biology, but you can also use everyday examples). See decades of research on situated learning and related approaches. https://careerladdersproject.org/docs/Contextual%20Approache...

Developmental courses can also be compressed https://blog.careertech.org/research-review-promising-practi...

Dual enrollment saves time and money and improves success. Let high school students take college math courses.

Corequisite remediation is the current best practice. Let students take regular (not remedial) math courses, and improve advising and support. https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/easyblog/future-of-corequisite-... https://strongstart.org/resource/corequisite-mathematics-too...

I took remedial math at UNC Chapel Hill. My parents decided to homeschool me my entire childhood, but their math ability ended at about the 8th grade, everything else I had to figure out on my own.

I always thought I was bad at math, but it turns out having a teacher who is not your parent with a tenuous grasp on algebra helps a lot. That remedial math course changed my life forever and let me work in a career I love.

I am eternally grateful to the kind graduate student who led that course - John, wherever you are, thank you.

a long-time peeve of mine is that people who frequently talk about the value of a 'well rounded (liberal arts) education' almost always have an implicit exclusion of math.

they think it's great to have some basic knowledge in a wide variety of subjects -- history, literature, music, etc. But when it comes to math, they'll just shrug and gleefully say "i'm not really a math person!"

So as someone who took many of those remedial math classes this article rubbed me a bit the wrong way. Not necessarily that any of his descriptions are wrong about the students or the type of things it covers. Instead there seemed to be this underlying theme in the article about it being a waste of time and of little value to society. I strongly feel any time us as humans sit in a classroom and try to better ourselves even when we ultimately fail, it benefits society overall.

Personally, I was in the basic math in High school, like long division/multiplication freshmen/sophomore year. When I first went to community college around the age of 16-19 I got farther, taking Algebra I and then II. However, once I reached Calculus I crashed and burned, although I did great in my CS and other science classes.

I eventually entered the work force (programming/tech) and over the next half dozen years tried and failed at least 3 times to restart at community college usually failing at Calculus I or college level english. Finally, at 30 it seemed to take, I eventually passed Calc I, Discrete, Linear, got my degree. A blend of community college and state school so I didn't break the bank.

I have friends from other sides of the world that have told me this would only really be possible in the US. In many places their is no equivalent of community/junior colleges or an attempt at adult remedial education. Instead you place in your teens, and if you score well enough you get to go to college. Otherwise, its trade school or similar and much more difficult to escape your socio-economic class. The author and others seem to be advocating for something similar here under the guise of it being unethical to waste resources or give hope to the dumb dumbs. I can't say I agree...

I had a very interesting work-study job in my first year in college, teaching dyslexic students who were struggling with basic algebra - essentially, walking through their homework assignments with them. Success meant figuring out some way of presenting the problem that worked for them, typically with some kind of physical example. I remember one student in particular could simply not grasp the notion that feeding x into a function f(x) would generate a point y on a two-dimensional graph, not even for a simple straight line, let alone an exponential or sine curve. Eventually a machine analogy worked: here's a vegetable slicer, you throw a number into it, it spits out another number - reproducibly. To describe this machine, we write an algebraic equation.

However, this would have been absolutely impossible in a large class - these students needed individually tailored one-on-one attention for at least an hour each to get the ideas across to them. Some parents can afford to hire such private tutors, some can't.

Also, people seem to have natural affinities for different areas of mathematics, just like people naturally take to different sports. I have no idea of whether genetics plays a role, although clearly in physical sports body types matter - the long-distance runner is unlikely to also be a champion weightlifter, etc. I've also noticed that some people who claim to be 'bad at math' often have good mathematical skills that they don't even think of as math, e.g. combinatorics as applied to playing games like cards or Scrabble.

In the end, mathematics is a hard subject and students who want to master any aspect of it will need at least three hours of study on their own (or assisted) for each hour spent in class listening to an instructor. It's not for everyone, and that's okay.

Seems that a significant cause of college students struggling to pass remedial compulsory math classes is that colleges are often woefully bad at teaching. Are they really offering a 'class', or is it just a vaguely enumerated syllabus, delivered with the patronizing assumption that if prodded, students will remember the stuff they were supposed to learn in high school?

I taught "College Algebra" at a Big Ten university for one semester, 25+ years ago, when I was in between jobs.

The Freshmen took a math test during orientation and were slotted into either Remedial, College Algebra, or Calculus.

It's my understanding that the curriculum of College Algebra is the bare minimum of topics that must be taught in order to offer the course for credit at an accredited college. This explains why the topics are seemingly drawn at random, with little flexibility.

The lower level "remedial" courses were offered but did not come with credit. You still had to pass College Algebra in order to graduate. Or I think maybe Statistics.

The education system has struggled to teach math since time immoral. Every generation tries some new method, and is ultimately declared a failure. I don't have a good answer. Most adults retain barely any of their high school or college math, including people in STEM occupations. I've heard "I'm not really a math person" from engineers. Parents remember how their math was taught, and complain when their kids aren't learning math the same way, but frankly the parents are terrible at math.

Great read! I wish there were an update from 2013 to the post-covid landscape too, but sadly the anonymous professor died of cancer sometime in early 2020.

Fuck Cancer.

I was absolutely shocked to hear that his institution was even offering the pre-pre-remedial math at all (back in 2013).

"There’s a huge issue of integrity in the pre-sub-remedial course. If you’re teaching 3rd grade material to an adult, you consider that adult to have the cognitive skills of an 8 year old at best. There’s nothing wrong with trying to improve education and learning, but at some point, someone should think “This student didn’t learn this in 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade. Maybe he doesn’t want to learn this and we shouldn’t loan him money to learn it.” Failing that, admissions should think “Maybe loaning this person money that goes right to us would be taking advantage of someone with a mental disability and it would be not be acting with integrity to do that.” So far, these possibilities have never been raised at any meeting concerning remediation, and administration continues to sell these courses to anyone willing to go into debt to take them."

He's not wrong at all here. To me, giving that person a obviously impossible to pay back loan is immoral. Since it's been about 11 years and a pandemic later, I'd assume that the fed either patched this up and it's not able to be done this badly now, or that straight up illiterate people are getting in now too.

I have many academic friends. One woman is a professor at a lower-tier state school. They are keeping their enrollment consistent but fewer people apply every year, resulting in intellectually declining classes every year. There are simply too many colleges, and our public schools are by-and-large atrocious for the money we spend, so it’s not going to get any better. Certainly throwing more money at public schools is not the answer. In my opinion we need to take all the smart and ambitious kids and segregate them into good schools, while the rest can be glorified day care for kids on their phones.

So, I read this article and have to disagree with this point that people in very remedial math classes have cognitive issues .

I can think of so many exceptions to this that I have personally encountered. Its usually because of poverty or home schooling and often isnt the fault of the student. I know someone that is far more intelligent than I (I went to a top 3 cs school and have had a very successful career). This person can't do basic math because they were never given the opportunity to learn it. There are also people that are perfectly intelligent, but messed up really badly when they were younger. They should have the opportunity to turn things around.

> “The Civil War was inevitable, but it didn’t have to be that way.” ---quote from a student history paper. A month before the paper was written, the history professor ranted extensively to the rest of the faculty how annoying it was that he had to stop his lecture, and spend time defining the word ‘inevitable’ to his class.

This sounds like it could have been an interesting discussion about what historians mean when they call something inevitable. "Inevitable literally means unavoidable, and in practice historians use it to mean a situation where... Scholars often say the war became inevitable after..."

I've never completely understood why most American universities insist on a broad range of subjects (by comparison, in the UK it's common to begin to specialise aged 16, after which you might never need to academically write an essay/solve a maths problem - this isn't perfect either).

While I believe everyone should love mathematics and keep learning it as long as possible, forcing adults to study it is counter-productive. Lack of inclination to study maths also shouldn't stop people from attending university - something like creative writing really doesn't depend on it, although I sometimes wish there more stringent requirements for mathematical qualifications of journalists.

> “I co ming offise to day AAAAaaaa?”

--E-mail from a Vietnamese student. She got an A in my trigonometry class, dominating the other students despite not knowing much English. Yes, she did work in a nail salon, and no, she didn’t graduate the equivalent of high school in her native country.

What does a nail salon have to do with your point?

The guy also wrote an article called “Satisfied with poverty: an argument for ending welfare” with a libertarian business professor, so make of that what you will

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