alt Hacker News1 in 8 incoming freshmen at UCSD (a leading institution in the states) cant solve "x + 5 = 3 + 7"... Why would I pay 30k a year or whatever it is to get a degree from somewhere like that?
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What does your (dubious) example have to do with the quality of post-secondary education? If it has any relevance, it's for the quality of secondary education.
This is incorrect. It's 1 in ~50. Still bad!
8.5% of incoming freshmen place in Math 2. 25% of a class of Math 2 students could (EDIT: couldn't) answer 7+2=_+6
8.5% x 25% is about 2%, so 1 in 50.
The more important question is do they learn to solve it, fail out, or just get pushed through?
One of those is a bad outcome, but the other 2 are fine.
My roommate can solve this. And he just turned 6. I gave him today some equations with two unknowns....
You'd go to UCSD if you could solve that equation, and want to learn to do more. (If you can't solve the equation, UCSD is a very expensive way to learn how.)
I think the more relevant question is, why would you go to grade school and high school at institutions that produce graduates like that?
Illiterate incoming freshman are the product of the public middle and high school systems, not the university system.
For reference:
> Beginning in Fall 2022, the number of students placed into Math 2 began to grow rapidly. Math 2 was first created in 2016, and it was originally designed to be a remedial math course serving a very small number of first-year students (less than 100 students a year or around 1% of the incoming class) who were not prepared to start in our standard precalculus courses [...] In Fall 2024, the numbers of students placing into Math 2 and 3B surged further, with over 900 students in the combined Math 2 and 3B population, representing an alarming 12.5% of the incoming first-year class (compared to under 1% of the first-year students testing into these courses prior to 2021).
https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissio...
These are students that even middling American public schools would have failed to pass from high school in decades past, or would have later failed to meet standardized test requirements prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.