Are high school students getting the preparation they need for college math? The question, long a focus of study in K-12 math education and policy, is now the subject of a Senate inquiry.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, sent letters to nearly three dozen selective colleges and universities on Friday, requesting information about the math abilities of their incoming first-year students.
The move follows the release of a November report from the University of California, San Diego, which found a steep increase over the past five years in the number of freshmen at the institution requiring remedial math classes.
The report, compiled by an internal group of staff, made waves across the national media landscape, with reporters and commentators sounding the alarm and offering various diagnoses of the findings, from lower academic standards and a lack of focus on foundational skills instruction in K-12 to UC San Diego’s removal of standardized-testing requirements, such as the SAT or ACT, for entrance to the university.
“The United States faces a crisis in student achievement at the K-12 level that has begun to spill over into higher education, especially in math. … This state of affairs is unacceptable and demands immediate corrective action,” Cassidy, the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, wrote in the letters to the 35 universities.
The inquiries ask for math-placement data for first-year undergraduates from fall 2019 through fall 2025, descriptions of the math courses referenced in the data, and an explanation of how the institution makes placement decisions.
Why the SAT looms large in debates about college preparedness
The letters also ask whether colleges and universities require the SAT, ACT, or other math test for admission—something that’s become a flashpoint in conversations around the UC San Diego report.
The University of California system dropped the testing requirement in May 2020, contributing to a trend of institutions pausing or eliminating SAT and ACT requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The UC San Diego report lists the removal of standardized-testing requirements as one of the causes for students’ declining math skills, along with the effects of the pandemic on education, grade inflation, and admitting greater numbers of students from under-resourced high schools.
In the wake of the report’s release, many commentators argued that reinstating the testing requirement would go a long way to ensuring students’ preparedness, and serve as a guarantee that students could meet a threshold of college readiness.
It’s a popular policy with President Donald Trump’s administration.
In letters to the leaders of nine prominent universities this past October, the administration asked institutions to agree to a “compact for excellence in higher education” in order to gain preferential access to federal funds. Requiring applicants to submit SAT, ACT, or similar test scores was part of the list. (A collection of higher education associations have pushed back, arguing that the compact “offers nothing less than government control of a university’s basic and necessary freedoms—the freedoms to decide who we teach, what we teach, and who teaches.”)
Cassidy did not respond to questions sent to his spokesperson about standardized tests for college admissions.
Still, others in the math education field say that simply reinstating testing requirements wouldn’t necessarily solve the deeper problems that have led so many students to be unprepared for college-level math.
“Reversing the decline requires a nuanced analysis and the kind of strategic collaboration among high school and college educators that occurs outside of newspaper columns,” Pamela Burdman, the director of nonprofit Just Equations, a group that advocates for equity in math education, wrote in an opinion piece for the news outlet EdSource in December.
