What happens when even college students can't do math anymore?
66 comments
·November 19, 2025NiloCK
webdevver
>They seem to earnestly believe that it isn't an actual tool but a gatekeeping mechanism devised by autistic persons to humiliate normies.
it should be that, though.
Joel_Mckay
A learned language is often lost without regular repetitive practice. People often either become overly specialized in some area, or end up teaching basic-theory while regretting their life choices.
In time, most figure out people create pet mathematical fictions regardless of background, and while authoritative confident liars often allow people to feel better about uncertainty... it adds little value in the long-term. =3
zecg
> “Who is going to trust somebody who got a degree in airline engineering who doesn’t know how to think through a problem without a computer telling them the answer?”
I think the answer is Boeing
giancarlostoro
What bewilders me is that I've read (maybe here on HN) that the issue with some of those planes is a lot of the key people who built the previous generations were moved around to different departments, and I'm just thinking to myself, are you guys going to get the right people in the right spots? This is embarrassing and downright evil if you aren't taking steps to ensure the quality of your aircrafts.
randycupertino
I read a great book about Boeing called Flying Blind by Peter Robinson about the 737 crisis and the downfall of Boeing, its main premise was how a toxic corporate culture took over, removed power from scientists, safety and engineers and gave power to lobbyists and MBA finance types. They pressure regulators to approve the 737 and rush production, skimping on safety and qualifications. The McDonnell Douglas merger poisoned Boeing’s culture as MBA style management replaced an engineering first culture and shifted priorities from “build the safest airplane in the world” to “hit aggressive quarterly targets.”
A key component was the move of corporate HQ and power base from Seattle to Chicago where the execs lived, wrestling it away from the engineers in Seattle. Later they moved their HQ again to Washington DC to be closer to lobbying!
ceedan
It's a publicly traded company that is enslaved to it's investors, growth, profit and quarterly reporting.
giancarlostoro
The more time passes the more I hate publicly traded companies. I feel like the stock market rots companies.
NickC25
Ironically enough, they just got a Pentagon contract for 6th generation fighters.
randycupertino
Benefits of moving their HQ to Washington DC for closer proximity to lobbying starting to pay off! Relocating corporate to DC puts their execs within arm's reach of the ones who approve their contracts, oversee it's safety regulations and bail it out when the plane's software causes crashes.
BurningFrog
As long as odd college students can still do math, it's not a big problem.
izzydata
rolls eyes
I unfortunately have to upvote this.
TrackerFF
Let's be clear though, there's quite a difference in doing problems related to working memory, mental computation, etc. under time constraints - usually what you get when taking standardized tests, aptitude tests, IQ tests, etc. - and solving "actual" real world math problems, like mathematical modelling, numerical methods, and what have you.
I'm sure if I walk around in the office and ask people a problem like "Car A starts driving south at time zero, with speed 30km/h. Car B is located 10 km down south and starts driving north 5 minutes later, at speed 45 km/h, at what time do they meet? You have 1 minute. Go." a bunch of them will start to sweat, and many will likely fail - even though they have graduate STEM degrees.
jackallis
".....In 2020, system leaders voted to phase standardized-test scores out of admissions decisions. They argued that the tests worsened racial divides and unfairly privileged wealthy students. But SAT and ACT scores are the most reliable predictors of a student’s math ability, the report found...."
Aurornis
The war on admissions testing is one of the worst education trends. I couldn’t believe it when it was first proposed, but I was even more shocked when the trend started to spread.
It does appear to be reversing a little bit in some places as schools realize they were fooled by people pushing ideology over data and results, but it’s going to take a while.
For those who aren’t in the loop: There’s an ideological push to eliminate testing, aptitude tests, and even to eliminate different educational tracks (accelerated learning programs, AP classes, advanced math tracts) in the name of pursuing equality for everyone. The idea of testing people for aptitude or allowing some students to go into more advanced classes than others is not allowed by some ideologically-driven people who think all students must be given strictly equal education at every grade level.
screye
It goes deeper. The problem lies at the source.
> people pushing ideology
University Education programs and as a result teaching bodies have been taken over by ideology.
I believe it is in part because all the teaching low hanging fruit has been established for centuries. So the only 'novel' things the programs can do is talk about discrimination, disparate outcomes and hand-wavey ideas about improving education. The departments have some of the lowest bars for academic professorship and as a result, the quality of research is similarly bad -> terrible.
The war on phonics is the canonical example.
The fault doesn't lie with 'people'. The above mentioned institutions are squarely at fault for making education ideological, and they should explicitly be blamed for the deterioration in student performance.
le-mark
Kurt Vonnegut saw this trend emerging back in 1961:
https://archive.org/stream/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Berge...
lotsofpulp
I wonder if college administrators are using discrimination as an excuse to decrease standards to increase number of students, which then increases their pay and job security. It is well known that not only did number of young people peak, but also that outside of the top 20 or so, college is nowhere near worth the tuition prices.
The only other option is for college administrators to be disturbingly stupid.
TechRemarker
Imagine still will be all the advanced tracks but will be only reserved for those with the resources to afford it and seemingly further the divide.
mlboss
I don’t think it is about resources. Growing up in 3rd world country I have zero resources. It is the drive of student and higher standards from parents and teachers that matters. Everybody is just getting soft.
Jweb_Guru
I have never met a single person who wanted to learn advanced mathematics who was prevented from doing this by not getting into the college of their choice, and I know a lot of mathematicians. Do you think genuinely believe that people who get an 800 on the math portion of the SATs (which is actually a pretty large number of people) are struggling to get admission to university at all?
corpMaverick
IMHO. It is futile to level the field with the wealthy. They will always have the better opportunities, education, connections, etc. They will find a way.
But we should keep trying to give more opportunities to the less fortunate. Better education, remedial classes, free school lunches, child credits, etc. We do that by asking the wealthy to contribute more. Not by taking away their advantages.(e.g. Admission tests)
skeezyjefferson
"But SAT and ACT scores are the most reliable predictors of a student’s math ability, the report found...."
how else do they gauge someone's math ability then?
Aurornis
They don’t. The movements pushing these ideas are against the idea of aptitude testing. Many of them are even against the idea of having advanced classes for those who are ahead.
It’s not a niche ideology, sadly. It’s going mainstream. A core part of Zohran Mamdani’s platform was his goal to phase out gifted education programs, for example.
triceratops
> his goal to phase out gifted education programs
Gifted education programs for kindergarten. I don't necessarily agree with that either but it's important to be accurate when talking about proposed policies. The man isn't talking about taking away AP algebra. Most kindergarteners still need to be told not to eat their boogers.
tehjoker
There is a silver lining though, when everyone is in the same class, better off people don't think they can escape and push to make the program better for everyone.
naIak
Gauging someone’s abilities is meany mean.
bena
One could use course grades. The problem with that is the variance in instructor quality between institutions.
perrysmith
That’s why it isn’t a reliable indicator of aptitude. A student who earns all A’s at a top level public school and a student who earns all A’s at a low level public school aren’t necessarily operating at the same academic level.
massysett
Thank you, this answers the question I was going to pose in a comment: why did this supposedly selective university admit students who can’t do basic math? Maybe their grade wouldn’t reflect it, but surely a standardized test like SAT or ACT would have flagged this? Maybe instead of remedial courses, they should stop admitting unqualified students?
Theodores
How much mathematics is needed anyway?
In the day job, how many people have to use maths skills beyond arithmetic?
What about trigonometry?
Differential equations?
Integration and calculus?
To be honest, if I am using Boolean Logic then that might as well be 'advanced mathematics', far beyond the comprehension of non-coders. Even simple trigonometry isn't so simple to most people.
Clearly we need some people on the planet able to do more than basic arithmetic, however, what is the point in trying to teach the whole population how to do differential equations given the lack of workplace opportunities to use such knowledge?
The why question isn't explained with maths beyond the theoretical 'yep, you will earn more'. Too many maths textbooks are utterly abstract, you might as well be learning cuneiform for the amount of practical use cases.
It seems to me that the policy makers and journalists that complain about the demise of maths skills aren't doing a lot of maths themselves yet they want to force maths on the masses, as if it was good for you in a 'eat your greens' type of way.
Maths is hard and it really does not suit a lot of people. Fluency in maths is only attainable by a few, the majority that can do maths need a lot of armbands, whether that be calculators, text books or internet crib sheets. Then there is everyone else, not even floundering, just giving it a miss.
Rather than forcing the entire population to be maths geniuses, which will never happen, maths needs to be a specialist subject chosen by those that know what it can be used for, and with ambitions to take a career path where maths happens.
BunsanSpace
1. A lot of math crops up in unexpected ways in everyday life. Trig in construction & wood working, calculus & integration when doing finance, &c.
2. It's not about teaching how to crunch numbers, it's also teaching general problem solving, and using tools to break down complex problems using your various tools to solve it. This translates directly to everyday life.
As a programmer we use calculus and integration all the time in performance testing and stats when we aggregate the data and pull insights. I have started getting into making canopies for events and I have todo a lot of trig to calculate the dimensions of the shapes before I send them to the printer. Hell I even use lots of my high school physics when I go to calculate the load to choose to right type of rope or metal wire and to determine if anchoring points are safe or not. We also use a lot math when calculating generator loads and building power grids for raves & festivals. I also do aerial circus and we use lots of physics when setting up rigging points and determining safety margins. Hell just having a basic physics understanding is really important to figure out if the carabiner you're using is going to kill you or not.
So yea math is really fucking important, and you do use it everyday even if it's just the problem solving it teaches.
kikimora
You designed a new beautiful car - a cube 3 m by 3 because, why not? Very modern, has plenty of space. You can even install solar panels at the top to charge its batteries.
Now tell me, without differential equations: * how it deforms at impact? * how much more or less air resistance it has and how it depends on speed? * how quickly solar panels can charge the battery given that charging speed is non-linear?
So you’ll end up building countless prototypes and crash them, run at different speeds and charge with different panels and battery types. 100 years later you find out that its shape is just not good.
In the meantime solving few simple differential equations and optimization problems would tell you the same.
Or something very close to programming. How do you add two empirically measured probability distributions describing how two teams perform?
qsort
> How much mathematics is needed anyway? In the day job, how many people have to use maths skills beyond arithmetic?
A lot. It's also pretty funny that your examples of useless math are 3 of the most concrete and directly applicable concepts in the entire set of human knowledge. Try, idk, ergodic Ramsey Theory next time.
> What about trigonometry?
Ever heard about FM radio? Or anything that takes a Fourier series? Anything using complex numbers? Game programming? Graphics? Positional encodings in large language models?
> Differential equations?
My brother in christ, literally Newton's second law.
> Integration and calculus?
Ever needed to numerically find the minimum of a function or solve an equation? Newton-Raphson? Literally all of machine learning?
The thing with math is that if you aren't familiar with the concepts then you don't know what you don't know.
nathan_compton
A truly epic weird take.
My weird take is this: calculus and other sorts of advanced mathematics are cultural artifacts as much as they are tools and people should be exposed to them more or less for the same reasons that we are exposed to Shakespeare or the history of world religions: they are beautiful, and learning them changes us in positive ways.
One thing I've learned after most of a lifetime being smart is that being smart barely matters. It doesn't matter whether people are good at math or bad at it or smart. Most people never achieve fluency in most subjects. But children deserve to be taught math as a matter of basic dignity and eudemonia. The attitude that education is a pragmatic thing meant to achieve some end other than enrichment of the person is why the US is so fucked.
ajross
Embarassing Occam's failure in the lede:
> For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment.
Good grief. No, it's just the pandemic. The kids whose middle school years got disrupted are behind on skills taught in middle school.
Can you squint and blame other things? Sure. But experimental education policies are hardly new ideas, and none of the nonsense from previous decades has shown an effect like this. If you want to show up to the game with a claim that it's some other effect, I want to see a big exposition of why it's not the obvious hypothesis at work.
It's covid, folks. And over the next 3-4 years the scores will bounce back (to much crowing in the media from whichever faction wants to claim credit). Write it down.
netsharc
Did you just read 5 words into the article and come to this conclusion? The article that the authors researched and told us it's been going on since before the pandemic?
Ah, their next article should be about the confidence of fools...
ajross
I did! Here's the quote:
> But the national trend is very clear: America’s students are getting much worse at math. The decline started about a decade ago and sharply accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic.
So I, a "fool", read that and think: Hm... well if the article isn't giving numbers I'm going to take the "sharp acceleration" as a statement about magnitude and clearly infer that the pandemic is at fault.
Again, is the subject complicated? Sure. But education policy doesn't produce effects like this. It never has, probably never will, and the article even doesn't claim it does.
You know what does produce effects like this? Keeping 13-year-olds out of class for two years.
I mean, come on. I repeat: write it down, in 4 years we'll all be reading about the miracle of American education policy. And that will be wrong too.
WoodenChair
You're hand wavy "it's the pandemic" neglects the other evidence provided in the article that happens to coincide with the pandemic such as the elimination of test scores as admissions criteria to many universities. And the article certainly doesn't blame it wholly on the pandemic, for example here are two theories it presents:
> How did this happen? One theory is that the attention-shredding influence of phones and social media is to blame. The dip in math scores coincides with the widespread adoption of smartphones; by 2015, nearly three-quarters of high-school-aged kids had access to one. A related possibility is that technology is making students complacent. Emelianenko told me that students “are just not engaged in math classes anymore”; they seem to believe that they don’t need to learn math, because they can use AI instead.
> Or maybe students have stopped achieving in math because schools have stopped demanding it of them. During the George W. Bush administration, federal policy emphasized accountability for public schools. Schools that saw poor performance on standardized tests received increased funding at first, but if scores still didn’t improve, they had their funding pulled. Research suggests that this helped improve math outcomes, particularly for poor Black students. After 2015, however, the federal government backed off from its accountability measures, which had faced bipartisan criticism. (Some teachers’ unions and progressive parents wanted less emphasis on standardized tests, and some conservative politicians wanted the federal government to remove itself from education policy.) Many schools across the country have shifted toward making math engaging for students at the expense of evidence-based teaching practices. And due to funding shortages or misguided efforts to improve equity, many students are held back from taking the hardest math courses.
SPICLK2
Our response to Covid was just the accelerant. We're lucky, in a way, as we can see the outcomes of many current policies a lot quicker.
skeezyjefferson
cant do mathematic? shouldnt it be mathematics? ie "...students cant do maths anymore?"
in_a_hole
As a brit, yawn.
adzm
Both are fine. The singular form "math" is predominant in the States. But, notably, not "mathematic"
gizajob
Maths is the singular form in English speaking countries.
notorious_pgb
Not in the US.
null
> “Who is going to trust somebody who got a degree in airline engineering who doesn’t know how to think through a problem without a computer telling them the answer?”
Years ago when I was working in education (Canadian public schools) our school board had a conference ahead of the school year. The keynote was an inclusive-ed researcher / consultant / speaker who told an anecdote of how they had successfully lobbied for a student with a substantive intellectual disability to be registered for the high school physics courses.
Part of the anecdote was pushback from the physics head: "I've known Jake for years. Great kid. But what is he supposed to get out of physics class?"
The consultant's in-anecdote response: "what is anybody supposed to get out of physics class?"
Wild laughter and applause.
---
A surprising number of people in education seem to simply not know that there is substantive and consequential content in the curriculum.
Having never really learned math, they've never really used it. Having never used it, they don't recognize its utility.
They seem to earnestly believe that it isn't an actual tool but a gatekeeping mechanism devised by autistic persons to humiliate normies.