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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25663 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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(Stupid) Kids These Days

Article link - no paywall

Rough summary:

At our campus, the picture is truly troubling. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of freshmen whose math placement exam results indicate they do not meet middle school standards grew nearly thirtyfold, despite almost all of these students having taken beyond the minimum UCOP required math curriculum, and many with high grades. In the 2025 incoming class, this group constitutes roughly one-eighth of our entire entering cohort. A similarly large share of students must take additional writing courses to reach the level expected of high school graduates, though this is a figure that has not varied much over the same time span.

(Emphasis above added)

Excellent CW quote:

Can the cultivation of excellence survive an egalitarian world?

UCSD isn't an online for profit school. It has traditionally admitted kid from middle to upper middle class families that maybe weren't deeply thinkers, but were assumed to be strongly better than average. Their grads go on to form the professional classes of California suburbs, albeit not the ones with $2m media home price gated communities. Far from a bad life.

And the faculty be saying kids are real, real dumb. Like, really tho.

The rearward looking CW angle is too obvious; DEI, affirmative action, grade inflation in High Schools and a "no child left behind" attitude. I'd sprinkle on some helicopter-parent pressuring as well. For those of you interested in that angle, I await your hopefully hilarious takes.

I'm more interested in the future CW angle. Color me skeptical that these kids, already 18+, are going to really buckle down and crack the books now. If you've been retard-maxxing for nearly two decades, it's hard to slow the Downs and speed up the study. But, as the Dean in Animal House, said, _"Fat, Drunk, and Stupid" is no way to go through life. So what happens to these kids?

10 years from now, are we seeing a new sub-class of horrifically incompetent 30 year olds? If so, how does that change policy outcomes. A lot of well intentioned liberals have been smashing the vote button for welfare programs for going on six decades now because they see "structural" problems everywhere - of course the less fortunate need our benevolent support (definitely not noblesse-oblige). But when it just becomes plainly obvious that the COVID generation just has permanent banana brains, does that suicide empathy actually start to dry up?

There's a lot of discourse on the online dissident right about what will finally "wake up" the productive members of society. It usually ends up in HBD adjacent spaces. I wonder if the real "oh shit" moment will be far more obvious - stupid people, of any race, create massive problems and we've been boosting the stupid coefficient for somewhere near 15 years straight now.

See this is why I think the discourse about AI is so silly. AI has surpassed the median human intellect years ago. The average person cannot write fiction to even AI-slop standards, the average person cannot perform fairly simple mathematics, recall straightforward scientific facts, let alone translate between languages, write code, or any of the testable intelligence skills we judge LLMs with. They do not understand inflation, interest or any mildly complex abstract logic. The average person could not earn a living with their mental faculties alone. They require a body or just rely on state subsidies.

GPA 4.0 but in remedial math? That's American clownshow education for you! But the average American is far above the global average, American education is, adjusted for demographics, top-tier according to PISA. Human experts >>> AI >>> Average American >>> Average person.

It doesn't matter. De facto a college degree is just a four year vacation. It's still a good investment to make, but less so.

Now, the motte is going to chime in that there's an absolute dingbat making six figures answering emails somewhere. I believe that, even if this isn't actually the boss's boss's mistress. But if you replace this person with a random trucker or construction worker, you will discover why this person's job required a college degree. There are of course jobs that require a college degree and don't need one- they don't pay six figures, but they exist. They also have a lower early-termination rate than their equivalent which doesn't require a college degree.

But if you replace this person with a random trucker or construction worker, you will discover why this person's job required a college degree.

I happen to work an office job at a trucking company. A lot of our office guys don't have college degrees, a lot of them are former drivers, and I would say that my employer is more willing to take a chance and invest resources into training someone than many (They hired me with a stale humanities degree and driving/dispatching experience from outside of trucking.), but as a rule the managers are either 50+ or have a degree. Similarly, while it's likely true that the best dispatcher would have driving experience there's a good chance that a random driver plopped into the office either isn't bright enough, lacks the necessary computer/literacy skills, or lacks the disposition/patience to sit in an office all day and be professional when things start going wrong. That, and the sort of drivers who have those skills make more money driving than the dispatchers and either aren't interested in management or are stuck in the golden handcuffs such that they can't afford to stick out the lower office paycheck long enough to make terminal manager.

And FWIW as someone who was a lousy student who nevertheless graduated with a 3.5 from a state school on scholarship I think at minimum a college degree demonstrates some combination of industriousness and competence (maybe not what you would call "smart", but one does have to attend some amount of classes, complete some amount of assignments, and pass some amount of tests) or at least some variety of talent to pass those classes with a smoke and mirrors show. Was I a pizza delivery driver first, an alcoholic second, and college student third? Pretty much, but I did write those papers, pass those tests, and was able to triage assignments and exams such that I made the grades I needed to with a minimum of effort. Was it a waste of an opportunity to be educated and/or network my way into a real career? Probably. Did pulling it off when I could've just dropped out and gone full townie demonstrate something? I'd like to think so.

Oh, and we tend to shuffle our dingbats into the safety department.

I was a bit skeptical about the 30-fold increase, because this does tell us little about the absolute numbers. It would be very easy to get such an increase by going from 0.01% to 0.3%, which would probably not herald the decline and fall of the Occident.

But the text confirms that 12.5% go to remedial classes, and a whopping 85% of those (e.g. more than 10% of the freshmen) were unable to expand (1+s)^2.

My heart goes out to their mathematics department whose professors are now busy designing special classes to fix this.

Now, I am not sure how the US university system works. Is this some weirdo sadist thing where university students enrolled in medieval English literature have to take math classes and the students enrolled in CS have to take PE and analyse poems? Or are these unlucky 10% of children left behind actually enrolled in a subject where they will need some math (e.g. anything at least as STEMy as psychology)?

If it is the former, then the solution would be to stop torturing students with subjects which are irrelevant for them. If it is the latter, remedial classes will not qualify the students, it would be like giving a class on the alphabet to fix freshmen who enrolled for law school while being illiterate. Much kinder to point them to jobs which do not require math instead (I don't think the US military would want you if you can not expand quadratics? OnlyFans? ICE grunt?).

At the risk of my inner elitist shining through, in Germany you do not find people who can not expand quadratics at universities. I had and have a low opinion on the mathematical ability of my high school classmates, math class was always more about training monkeys into following algorithms to solve problems than it was about exploring the structures of mathematics and proving theorems, but the ones which were unable to be trained to that modest standard simply did not pass the class.

Pretty sure English lit majors do indeed have to take some kind of basic math classes at all US schools, the kind that would involve expanding (1+s)^2 for example. I think English lit majors are typically forced to do possibly up to Calc 1 or some kind of "calculus for liberal arts" type course, nothing more. So to answer that question of yours, I do not think the % of kids who are going into a subject where they need some math who are in remedial math is anywhere near 12.5%, probably more like 1% or less. Everyone I've met who is doing some kind of mathematical major is not in remedial math. But maybe there are a good amount, say a 12-15% or maybe even a bit more who start at Pre-Calculus instead of Calc 1 for an engineering program for example, but I wouldn't call that remedial math, they're not starting at high school algebra I. I have heard that in Europe mathematical majors tend to already have calc sequence and linear algebra finished coming into university, not sure if this is true. In the USA at least, there are a decent number of accelerated students that are coming into freshman year ready for courses that come beyond calc 3/lin alg.

UCSD has the crazy system where the gen-ed math requirements are set by the college not the university. So if you are in sixth college in a non-STEM major you can get away with one "Structured Reasoning" course like Intro to Philosophy, and one "Exploring Data" course like Stats for Psychology, and no actual math. It looks like if you are in Revelle college you are required to take Calc I/II.

Interestingly, all the undergrads do have a climate change gen-ed. How they are supposed to understand any climate modeling without knowledge of PDEs is a bit of mystery to me.

IMO if your job does not require the level of competency required to pass Calc I, your job should not require a bachelors degree.

A bachelor's degree is supposed to an academic laurel, and mathematical reasoning is a key pillar of the academy:

Let no one ignorant of geometry enter

But the text confirms that 12.5% go to remedial classes, and a whopping 85% of those (e.g. more than 10% of the freshmen) were unable to expand (1+s)^2.

This is actually not as horrible as I was expecting. 87.5% don't need remedial math is impressive!

EDIT: I guess I can't make the prior conclusion. The kids who were not sent to remedial math may not necessarily know how to do (1+s)^2

... at UCSD?

This is the internet and people lie, but scout's honor I got perfect scores on the math section of the PSAT, the SAT, and the GMAT. I could not for the life of me remember how to expand (1+s)^2. I run a business, lots of accounting-type math, but haven't given the slightest thought to quadratics in two decades.

Kinda scary how you just... lose stuff over time.

It's easy enough to just multiply it out if you forgot the formula.

Yeah my hungover brain realized that a moment later, but I decided to leave the post as written anyways.

Now, I am not sure how the US university system works. Is this some weirdo sadist thing where university students enrolled in medieval English literature have to take math classes and the students enrolled in CS have to take PE and analyse poems? Or are these unlucky 10% of children left behind actually enrolled in a subject where they will need some math (e.g. anything at least as STEMy as psychology)?

I'm not sure that that specific college is like. Back when I was studying studio art a lower tier state college, they suggested that I should take the kind of math that centrally featured the golden rectangle and spiral, and interesting facts like people who used to calculate in a base 60 system. We did have to learn the quadratic formula, but nobody really expected us to do much with it.

I don't think the US military would want you if you can not expand quadratics?

I suspect the veterans in our midst can provide more specific anecdotes, but I think the minimum ASVAB score doesn't require this generally, and is probably lower than you seem to be thinking. But you might not get a desirable specialization.

The official IQ cutoff to be militarily useful is 83. This is not an indicator that the military requires all of its members to do algebra.

Now it does vary quite a bit by MOS, with high ASVAB scores leading to more desirable ones and lower scores leading to KP, warehouse work, and sentry duty.

I don't think the US military would want you if you can not expand quadratics?

Not the US military, but the Canadian military (the artillery division, at least) had some "homework" for it where trigonometry was necessary (but using some weird measurement instead of degrees or radians). The CFAT (Canadian Forces Aptitude Test) was used to determine what roles you were allowed to go into in the military, and from my recollection (I didn't personally serve, but I had family who did) the lowest score allowable was something like a 7/42, which qualified you to be a cook - I think you had to get at least half right to be an officer, but again, this is like, 5-7 year old stuff in my memory, so I don't remember the exact breakpoints.

If anyone wants to take a practice version, https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/dnd-mdn/documents/jobs/20170906-preparing-for-aptitude-test.pdf is apparently the 2007 version.

We are retvrning 1500 years back. Mere ability to read, write and do basic arithmetic will again make you a superman seen by superstitious populace as wizard. Onwards to 6th century, bring back Dark Ages!

I have read some fascinating articles recently about how the rise of television and video as a medium more generally is a kind of societal regression from a literate culture to an oral one.

Except that people in medieval oral cultures had a ton of durable physical metis around complex daily life tasks, exploiting the natural environment, etc., which our peasantry lacks. Instead, your average semi-illiterate remedial math student has that same mental real estate devoted to... I guess, half-remembered sitcom plots, Vine memes, videogame cheat codes and obsolete Netflix navigation structures?

Maybe that doesn't matter; I don't know why it should be better to understand how to hunt a rabbit, skin, cook and eat it, or grow barley from scratch, than to know a bunch of 2000s-era Disney Channel theme songs and how to achieve a middling Fortnite score. One does feel viscerally more freeing than the other, though.

Maybe that doesn't matter; I don't know why it should be better to understand how to hunt a rabbit, skin, cook and eat it, or grow barley from scratch, than to know a bunch of 2000s-era Disney Channel theme songs and how to achieve a middling Fortnite score. One does feel viscerally more freeing than the other, though.

The only way out is through. Good case scenario, we invent Matrix-level VR tech sometime within the next 1000 years, allowing us all to viscerally experience these complex physical daily life tasks in entirely safe virtual environments, including the fear that one feels in true survival situations like our ancestors had to feel.

10 years from now, are we seeing a new sub-class of horrifically incompetent 30 year olds? If so, how does that change policy outcomes.

Yes, and the likely effects on outcomes are:

  • things get more dysfunctional
  • left-wing "bioleninist" patronage expands, over and above the demographic trends, further cementing the left's total lock on power
  • the remaining smart, functional people get squeezed harder to support this; and to prevent them from withdrawing or underperforming, the coercion applied will be greatly increased
  • unrest will rise, legitimizing the increasing use (in a politically-biased manner) or improving technologies of surveillance and oppression
  • the "Global American Empire" will increase its attempts to both expand the periphery, and further loot it, in hopes of directing as much of total global productivity as possible to keeping this system propped up, even as they "eat" more and more civilizational "seed corn" at home
  • and humanity hurtles further toward the inevitable and irreversible collapse of industrial civilization.

"Jamie, pull up that article about gen z kids raised on iPads not knowing what files and folders are."

I feel bad for feeling this way, and I do genuinely wish society as a whole hadn't failed these kids, but there's a part of me that's saying "Whew, I'll be secure in my software development career until retirement, even with the alleged threat of AI replacing me." I feel awful for feeling this way but I imagine there are others here that feel similarly?

I think it's the same feeling that motivates the (stereotype of) boomers going "Fuck them entitled kids." The part of me that's in control, however, is still pushing to fix society in the limited ways I can to hopefully fix things for future generations (I'm in agreement that despite how bad I feel for these kids there's probably no fix for the retard-maxxing for most of them this late in the game).

As far as what those fixes are, they're the same nonsense most of our right-wing denizens have already been harping on here for years (DEI, lowered standards, etc.). So I won't delve into them because I'm sure the other replies have already started that.

"Jamie, pull up that article about gen z kids raised on iPads not knowing what files and folders are."

I was always skeptical of this but I'm in a discord for a fairly old indie game and someone showed up and wanted to install a music expansion mod to it but couldn't fathom where to put it in the file structure even with images and several people describing. Eventually, after several video examples were made she/they figured out to put a folder full of music in the "music" folder. It is a game that's a portable install so they at least knew how to unzip something.

Let me paint a picture for you: It's about 15 degrees outside and you get into your freezing car to go to work. You give the car a little gas as you turn the key and it turns over but doesn't quite start. Unfazed, you give it another try, and you're closer, but no cigar. On your third try, you pay attention to how much gas you're giving it and, feathering the pedal just the right way, the car fires up. You sit in your driveway and rev the engine for a few minutes to get it warmed up. When you put it in gear, however, the engine stalls. You aren't surprised, but fuck, you thought you let it run long enough so that wouldn't happen. So you start it again and let it run a little longer, revving the engine occasionally, but it still stalls as you put it in gear. You're mildly concerned at this point but not to the point you'd call a tow truck or anything. You fire it up a third time (or a fourth, depending on how lucky you're feeling), before you decide to investigate the problem. You go outside and freeze your ungloved fingers off getting the hood open and sure enough, it's just as you suspected; the so-called "automatic" choke isn't opening properly. You stick your fingers into a running engine to open it up manually, get back into the car, and, if you're lucky, you'll be able to drive away. But you may have to repeat the process a couple times depending on how cold it is.

I used to drive a car from the 70s, and this sort of thing used to be the reality of owning an automobile. People like to bitch these days about how "you can't work on cars anymore!" and I agree, that car was super-easy to work on. And that was a good thing, because you'd be working on it a lot. I'm not talking about major repairs here, either. I'm talking about annual plug changes, annual point changes, setting the spark with a timing light, lube jobs, semiannual coolant changes, reformatting the carb for high-altitudes, and a bunch of other shit that nobody does anymore. It's still better than it was in my grandfather's day, when people would patch tires, carry spark plugs in the car for emergency changes, and cars would regularly overheat, even if there wasn't anything wrong with them. When was the last time your car was vapor locked?

I imagine that you've never experienced any of this before. These days, all cars have multiport fuel injection and electronic ignition and not starting and overheating aren't par for the course but signs of a serious problem. People aren't as knowledgeable about cars as they used to be, but people don't really have to be knowledgeable anymore. Computers had their own switch from carburetion to fuel injection, the switch from DOS to NT architecture. Just as most cars now run when you turn the key, most programs will run after a simple installation process, and run properly. But I can't fault today's kids for not understanding file structures any more than I can fault anyone born after 1989 for not knowing how autoexec.bat or config.sys works, or not knowing how to gap plugs. They might not know how to do things you think are basic, but it's not a problem unless they need to know, and if they never do need to know than the world is better off for it.

They might not know how to do things you think are basic, but it's not a problem unless they need to know, and if they never do need to know than the world is better off for it.

The problem is that this lack of knowledge is showing up even in kids pursuing careers in computer-related fields:

https://futurism.com/the-byte/gen-z-kids-file-systems

And this is a problem how, exactly? If actual computer scientists didn't know this I'd be concerned, but as much as we'd like to think that a certain base-level of knowledge is required to study something seriously, it really isn't. Those of us who grew up with file structures as an essential part of computing just assumed that they always would be, and are now shocked to find that technology has rendered them unnecessary for a lot of people. If indeed knowledge of them is necessary, then you're going to have to teach them about it.

For the general population, I am with @Rov_Scam here: who cares? In the future kids will probably just store their stuff in some Microsoft cloud and ask some LLM to get them whatever they need (unless it was flagged for copyright violation in the meantime).

On the other hand, not having a concept of a file system will severely limit what you could have done with a computer so far. How do you run your hello world Python script without passing the file name to your interpreter? I mean, there are probably cloud based solutions a la Overleaf which will just run your code in a browser, but being at the mercy of some SaaS platform seems like a sad existence for any programmer indeed.

I care, because my mobile OS is built with people who don't know how a filesystem works in mind, and is therefore trying to obfuscate from me the difference between a local folder with pictures and an album I uploaded to Picasa in 2010. The images from old scouting trips are pushed to the front, and the folders I want are hidden behind multiple screen transitions. I probably wiped some photos from 2023 because of a dialog asking me if I want to "fix" a problem with the memory card, conveniently omitting that said fix involves formatting it. A system for adults would tell me what is actually happening, but hey, no difference between cloud a local so who cares, right?

And that's not even getting into the weeds of a cloud provider running an analysis on every photo and piece of text uploaded, so that the social wrongthink score can be calculated.

I completely agree, the general theorem is "build a system that any idiot can use, and only idiots will want to use it."

Relatedly, I believe that command line interfaces are often superior to GUIs in practice because 'users willing to use a CLI' already selects for 'users willing to ignore a certain level of detail provided by the system, unless they have a good reason to care about it'. This allows the devs to provide an adequate level of detail. fsck can confidently mention inodes trusting that users who do not know about them do not will not halt and catch fire upon encountering an unknown term.

For android, the thing which makes the use bearable to me is to lie to the device and claim that I am an android developer. Voila, shell access via adb, no-hassle file transfer from the command line, etc pp. Together with picking a phone whose manufacturer supports OEM unlocks and a custom FW with root access, it almost feels like I actually own my device.

That's a bit of a motte-and-bailey, though, isn't it? He said "files and folders"; you say "autoexec.bat or config.sys". Even in a perfectly working system there's value to be had in being able to sort your own data (independently of application) and in being able to look through others' sorted data. You're talking about people who can't change spark plugs and he's worrying about people who can't steer. (although that metaphor works both ways, in the world of "car, drive me to my brother's house" and "computer, show all the meme images I edited that have a cat in them")

I don't know exactly how things are managed on an iPad, but my point is that if some kind of software renders files structures as we know them obsolete, there's no point in complaining about people not knowing how to use them. Not knowing how to steer a car isn't much of an issue if all cars are autonomous, similar to how automatic transmissions have rendered stick shifts obsolete for most people in the United States.

Not knowing how to steer a car isn't much of an issue if all cars are autonomous, similar to how automatic transmissions have rendered stick shifts obsolete for most people in the United States.

what do you do when the automatic system suffers an error and wants to drive off a cliff?

I think it's another "every generation feels the next is dumbner for not knowing things" paired with the fact that it's always true and we are probably consistently getting dumber year to year.

Old people made fun of me for knowing nothing about cars or the civil war generals, and now we get to make fun of them for computers.

Even our "dumb college students" stereotypes are getting dumbner. Compare this freshman of philosophy: https://youtube.com/watch?v=57vCBMqnC1Y

Old people made fun of me for knowing nothing about cars or the civil war generals

This has to be some form of stupidity specific to that side of the atlantic. I’ve never heard of anyone being made fun of for knowing nothing about cars and I’m close to 50. I also don’t recall pretty much any form of ”kids these days don’t know anything” in the 90s when I was a teen and would have certainly paid attention to it.

When there is any such talk locally, it’s always linked to phones replacing basic computer skills and specific changes made into schools and admissions since the late 90s that have turned education into shit.

I think focusing on DEI and affirmative action is misleading. This college is talking about a change in the past five years. The US has had affirmative action since the 1970s, the expansion of higher ed started in the 1980s, grade inflation in high school since the 1960s. Some happened between 2020 and 2025 that drastically changed the competence level of the incoming cohort.

It's probably the phones.

I think focusing on DEI and affirmative action is misleading. This college is talking about a change in the past five years.

These changes were made within the last five years, they were explicitly made to increase minority enrollment, and CA knew that these changes would result in a bunch of unprepared students. Their justification for the change is public (below), and it is solely focused on increasing minority enrollment.

https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview/sttf-report.pdf

They dropped the SAT in 2020, after a two year process: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/university-california-board-regents-unanimously-approved-changes-standardized-testing

I’m very grateful that I haven’t grown up with the educational system of the post-millennium compared to what I went through. Relative to what you have today, my K-12 education was preindustrial by comparison. Education was harder in a sense because it’s meant to be. You’re meant to achieve breakthroughs in your understanding as you build upon concepts from the simple to the more advanced. Book reports were still a regular. Cheating was more difficult. You still had calculators but good luck smuggling them into math class. For English literature we had SparkNotes to provide us with synopses for crap like Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which definitely put me to sleep. Can’t a brother read about Alexander the Great slapping people all over the Indian subcontinent?

Education has been very slow to adapt to the changing landscape over the last 20-30 years or so. If I were a teacher in 2025, all tech would be banned in my classroom and everything would be done in pen and paper. Forget homework. Hand out study guides with the expectation of upcoming exams. That’s your pass or fail. Anything that could be construed as a digital or electronic device at your desk is an automatic F. Classroom sizes should be much smaller IMO and unruly little POS should be thrown out of the classroom. I don’t recall where I saw the data on this but I read charter schools are vastly outstripping the performance of the public educational system. Maybe there’s some social/economic bifurcation there were the increase in mediocre performance is kept to one side (e.g. public schools, or urban vs. suburban vs. rural, etc., in more detail). I grew up in suburbia so I can’t comment on what education is like outside of it.

It’s funny one of the last books I read was Human Diversity by Charles Murray. The book contains a lot of width that covers much ground, but one thing he states is that much of the environmental landscape in education is going to be demystified. We know there’s significant interplay between heredity and environment and all is some mix and interplay of the two categories. Men and women for instance are remarkably similar and perform just as well in science and math as men do, but men concentrate more heavily in proportion to that category because of social and cultural factors. Men on the other had have been observed to be slower to develop if not sit below girls in social skills, and that’s actually due to biological factors. It’s the People-Things distinction and boys and girls use different cognitive and psychological tools in how they learn and navigate the world. How the educational system can reconstruct itself around those differences I’m not too sure.

If I were a teacher in 2025, all tech would be banned in my classroom and everything would be done in pen and paper. Forget homework. Hand out study guides with the expectation of upcoming exams. That’s your pass or fail. Anything that could be construed as a digital or electronic device at your desk is an automatic F.

Most public schools would never allow this. Many wouldn't allow you to take students phones and many schools require multiple interventions and a written plan before failing students and many don't let you give anything lower than a 50. And most schools these days issue students chromebooks and expect everything done on them. A lot of teachers would like to do these things but are literally prohibited by the administration or if they tried the administration would get brow beaten by angry parents into forcing you not to.

Go look at the teachers subreddit and you'll see them dreaming about doing half the things you propose. The American education system is basically not functioning at this point and has functionally zero actual standards.

... many don't let you give anything lower than a 50.

I don't understand why this policy is so often compared to awful ones. It is the same as averaging the student's letter grades to come to a final grade, instead of averaging percentages. It makes missed work a normal F instead of a super-duper F. As an unknowing-ADHD kid who struggled with getting homework done, especially when I knew the material already, that would have been an incredible blessing that hurt my learning not at all.

Because it means that failing is virtually impossible. Which means everyone graduates, which makes the high school diploma a useless credential, which means now people need a college degree to stand out. Rinse and repeat.

Because it means that failing is virtually impossible.

No, 50% brings down your average pretty quickly, if you get 50% frequently; it just doesn't tank the overall grades of students who get them on a "shit happens" basis.

High school diplomas were a heavily discounted credential long before I ever heard of that policy, which was well after I was out of school. (Though I think I did have a teacher or two who used letter grades in their gradebooks; I didn't appreciate them enough at the time.)

Sincere question: If you are worried that this will make it impossible to fail, what do the distribution of a failing student's assignment and test grades look like without it? Are these students getting Cs on the homework and the teacher is relying on a 30% test grade to counterbalance them, or what?

Yeah; what does this mean in practice and what is a passing grade?

Why not do it like this: no grade lower than a 50 for missed homework, but you need a 70 or better to pass? The B student who doesn't give a shit about homework and aces the exams still gets to pass; exams still own students who don't know the material.

charter schools are vastly outstripping the performance of the public educational system

Yes, because of two things:

  • A parent's ability to afford sending their child to such a school is strongly correlated with the intelligence of their child, and mid-to-high human capital still benefits from competent educators
  • Competent educators self-sort into charter schools and are expected to perform like it; if they don't, they're out

How the educational system can reconstruct itself around those differences I’m not too sure.

It already kind of has; we just... don't bother teaching about things any more. Too dangerous, you see.

Charter schools are free. They can totally rig the lottery to get your kids in if they feel like it, but they don't charge tuition. People who go to them are normal middle and lower-middle class.

They also do not get the creme de la creme of teacher quality, because they pay significantly worse than public schools due to lower per-student funding.

Charter schools do better because they have a plan and they stick to it, rather than following educational trends that originated in someone's ass around like a bull with a ring through its nose.

I don't even know that "ability to afford" is necessarily even financial: around here, charter (public) schools are covered by the state (with funds taken from the local district, which gets some political consternation). There may be some cost/time differences for parents regarding bus transportation, though. I think parents who select non-default education options are likely more invested in educational outcomes than probably even the median, regardless of prices --- which may well also have an impact.

A parent's ability to afford sending their child to such a school is strongly correlated with the intelligence of their child

This is true, but probably not in the sense that you mean it. There may be exceptions in terminology somewhere, but in general charter schools in the United States do not charge tuition. The price you must afford to send your kid to charter school isn't paid in cash, but in the currency of executive function: do you have the foresight to get your kid on an admissions list ASAP (we didn't try until our oldest was moving from a decent-enough elementary school to a weaker selection of middle schools, and so it wasn't until two years later that she got into a charter), and can you reliably shuttle your kid(s) to a more distant school, possibly with a less-standard schedule, without the school bus services that any public school will offer?

You could outdo charter school selection effects in any mid-size public school district by just using an admissions test (most charter schools aren't allowed to use one), but even where this happens it's just hanging on by a thread.

A parent's ability to afford sending their child to such a school is strongly correlated with the intelligence of their child, and mid-to-high human capital still benefits from competent educators

I know what TM’s general view is on this and the logic that tends to sit behind it and in one sense I’m with them, but we differ in how we interpret the science on this (IQ). I’m quite the strong hereditarian myself but people vastly overemphasize its importance relative to other effect sizes.

They [almost] tend to think IQ has a causal direct link to some kind of meritocracy in the way they think about it. And I don’t like how they treat the matter in reference to other populations, because then everything goes haywire and becomes a shouting match.

Here’s where TM and I agree. Yes to two points:

  1. Success requires mental ability.

  2. Social rewards are often linked to this success.

But here’s where it makes implicit assumptions that are highly contentious. First it assumes people only labor for material gain. Human beings don’t solely labor for extrinsic reward and the corollary of that assumption is to assume that if human beings didn’t, the mass of them would simply sit around and vegetate. If I could make more money working at a call center than I do with my current employer, I still would not partake of that arrangement due to other factors at play. And in fact I’m prepared to abandon my present vocation for a less satisfying and more demanding job because of the way in which it aligns my priorities with family life.

And how do we rank IQ and merit in this sense? Along what axes? Is a call center clerk of less social value than an NBA player or a software engineer? Why do any of these racial or phenotypic distinctions matter except under the assumption that we’d want to live in a racist society. In the current paradigm it has about as much importance as height does (which is to say it’s not irrelevant at all, but it isn’t at the forefront of policy decisions in such regard). IQ in this sense is mostly irrelevant for the state of an individual to want to be what he is and pursue what he chooses for himself.

But here’s where it makes implicit assumptions that are highly contentious. First it assumes people only labor for material gain.

This brings to mind Bill Burr's joke (responding to claims that commentators over-index on black sportsmen's athleticism compared to whites and not their intelligence):

You're acting like we can't be scientists.

"No. All I'm saying is, if there was a race to the microscopes, you fuckers would win!"

It doesn't matter if you don't labour for material gain. You have or don't have the advantages you have. If there's two groups of people competing for the few jobs studying 14th century Buddhist mandalas the ones with the higher IQ probably have an advantage.

Human beings don’t solely labor for extrinsic reward and the corollary of that assumption is to assume that if human beings didn’t, the mass of them would simply sit around and vegetate.

No, the argument would be that almost everyone has to work because most of us don't have nest eggs and our economy doesn't favor the people who drew the short straw cognitively (who knows, maybe AI will flip this). And people naturally resent this.

And how do we rank IQ and merit in this sense? Along what axes? Is a call center clerk of less social value than an NBA player or a software engineer? Why do any of these racial or phenotypic distinctions matter except under the assumption that we’d want to live in a racist society.

Ah yes, the old "who's to say?" I think this is the fat acceptance of intelligence discourse.

Competent educators self-sort into charter schools

I'm working on researching elementary schools. We have school choice, which means charters are an option. Maybe n=4 is not enough to be meaningfully significant, but I've noticed that no charter school I've seen talks about individual teachers on their webpage. I would think that they'd be worth advertising - if they're considered to be a cut above.

Am I reading signals wrong? Or do I just need to lurk moar?

Wait, 15 years? Was there a sea change after the recession, or something?

Anyway. I was putting together a response about supply vs. demand shocks, and how the change in student population really doesn’t have to represent a change in the overall one. Then I read the recommendations section of the actual report.

The majority of our workgroup recommends…a systemwide reexamination of the possible return to standardized testing.

Guess what year UCSD dropped their SAT/ACT requirements?

If you throw out the single best metric you’ve got to measure math ability, you are going to get more variance. Doesn’t matter if the population got worse or even better, you are giving up your ability to find them. You’ll have to use proxies like (inflated!) grades and made-up clubs. The workgroup was quite unsatisfied with their options.

This is rather frustrating. The SAT and ACT genuinely do have a host of systemic problems thanks to their effective duopoly on standardized testing. Apparently Goodhart’s law wasn’t one of them. But it’s not for lack of trying—you can’t drive a block in my town without hitting a Karen Dillard. Too many suburban strivers racing to the bottom. That whole ecosystem is only going to be boosted by all the dissident rightists looking to score points against DEI. Big win for credentialism.

I find it unlikely the COVID generation has "banana brains". A low-quality 1 to 2 years of high school shouldn't knock the reasonably intelligent back THAT far. You'd expect some drop but not as bad as they're describing. They also note that "Beginning with the cohort entering in 2021, standardized test scores were no longer used in the admissions process." This is probably the major part of the problem -- note that MIT, which one would expect to be more sensitive to this stuff, was among the quickest to return to standardized testing.

Since I am indeed an HBD believer, I find it unlikely we're creating too many more stupid people; that would take serious miseducation at a much younger age, or more dropping of people on their head. Instead, the UC system is probably sorting more poorly, with too many stupid kids ending up in the better schools and some of the smarter kids probably being displaced elsewhere (e.g. lower down in the UC or Cal State system, or to other schools which did not drop standardized testing).

Assuming we don't get a DEI revival when President AOC takes over in 2028, I think what we'll see is less-efficient hiring for a few years, with more of the stupid having to be sorted out in the employment market rather than by college admissions. Or, if the colleges maintain their own standards (which I find less likely) a greater fail-out rate in college.

MIT

Its rival Caltech is the US elite university run closest to a test based meritocracy.

Yeah, I doubt covid has anything to do with it frankly. It's almost certainly just the dropping of standardized testing as an admit requirement.

One angle that isn't discussed here (because I'm not sure it's relevant yet) is that there will soon be fewer college age kids. As the number of young adults decreases, colleges will either realign to enroll less qualified individuals or they will close. For now, that outcome has been staved off with immigration. But the good times will not last forever.

Is there a large population of people who would go to college but were rejected from every college? People in Community College are basically this demographic, right?

In 2022, the Current Population Survey estimated there were 3.5M college students enrolled in two-year institutions, down 2.2M from 5.7M in 2011.

So that number seems to be going down. Is it going down because institutions have lowered their requirements? I don't know. I think this is what we'd see if it was, though.

Community college has cheaper tuition, and it’s more compatible with an existing house/kids/job. So you’ll get people who could have gotten into state schools, but couldn’t or wouldn’t go. Not sure how the percentages stack up.

I’d like to see the pre-COVID numbers for two-year colleges. I suspect the pivot to online offerings closed some of the gap. Less reason to settle for the shorter degree if they’re both being run from your guest room.

A significant percentage of people in community college are also training for things that are not normally four year degrees- some of the less prestigious healthcare specialties(think phlebotomy etc), lots of trades careers, etc. This is simply a different market from what a university is offering, and the alternative to a community college for these things is a for-profit technical school, not a university.

I don't know how much this explains, but the guy working on his ASE certification(automotive mechanical) who has to take a few gen ed credits to get through the program, and the girl working on her LVN who needs to take a few math and general science classes as part of it, would probably not otherwise be going to a university.

The chart in the link showed it started going down before COVID, around the time we hit peak 18 year old

For now, that outcome has been staved off with immigration.

And why can't that continue for many, many years to come? People use hyperbolic talk about recent immigration with terms like "flood," but we, particularly in America, have not seen anything like what an actual flood of immigrants would look like.

Let's think this through.

First, it seems like some people are kind of not-friends with the United States. How many Chinese spies are here on Student Visa? How many future ISIS agents are we educating right now? Even without deliberate malice, different norms might lead to people smuggling dangerous fungi and genetically modified roundworms without safeguards, for instance.

Ok, but even if everything is sunshine and rainbows, how does this work out in practice? The majority of students in the US are only able to attend due to generous student loans available. There are people around the world who are able to afford the sticker price on an American education, and they send their brightest to us. But with the demographic collapse we're talking about, eventually we'll run out of rich kids and start needing poor kids. Are they going to be receiving unbacked loans to go to American schools? When they can just fuck off back to some jungle and laugh in the face of debt collectors?

Either we need a more explicit Indentured Servitude pact for college or this isn't starting to look like a solution either.

First, it seems like some people are kind of not-friends with the United States. How many Chinese spies are here on Student Visa? How many future ISIS agents are we educating right now? Even without deliberate malice, different norms might lead to people smuggling dangerous fungi and genetically modified roundworms without safeguards, for instance.

You're assuming the people who want to keep the colleges and their enrollment numbers propped up care about this.

But with the demographic collapse we're talking about, eventually we'll run out of rich kids and start needing poor kids. Are they going to be receiving unbacked loans to go to American schools? When they can just fuck off back to some jungle and laugh in the face of debt collectors?

Yes, and yes, because the "unbacked loans" will mostly be from the government, so it'll be the citizenry eating the costs of the defaults — either through taxes, or more likely via inflation, since the money will just be printed. In short, it'll provide a scheme for the government to keep these institutions afloat at taxpayer expense without just doing so directly, while also furthering demographic replacement.

Ah ok. I've been arguing that it's not a good idea or sustainable and you've been arguing that it's physically possible (for now).

The indentured servitude pact still doesn’t account for Earth’s inevitable immolation in the expanding Sun.

If you want to write something off for failing “eventually,” you’ve got to be more specific.

I thought it was very specific - if we give forigners unsecured loans for education they will just go back home without repaying them unless we actually indenture them and force them to stay to pay off the debt.

Enrollment should go down purely on account of the fact that we have far too many people enrolled already. There are ‘way’ too many kids in higher education than there should be.

I don’t think the major universities or even community colleges will likely close. Maybe their endowments should change. Some commitments these institutions have put upon themselves may have to be rolled back as a consequence of them perhaps being involved in programs and outreach they shouldn’t be involved in. But I doubt it’ll be a closure similar to what people have worried about, with libraries closing for instance because of the digitalization efforts and also a far smaller population of readers (which is sad).

There is probably a minimum number of kids a college needs to maintain the facilities they have already built. If a college with dorms and lecture halls to support 10,000 students over the course of a few years suddenly only has 5,000 students apply, they are going to have to try to give away property to avoid going bankrupt. And that's ignoring administrative bloat, post docs, etc.

The top 20% of schools would see the same number of students apply and they are selective enough there wont be much change. The next 20% of schools might need to start accepting people they wouldn't normally. The bottom 20% of schools will start to see fewer kids apply, because all the kids they used to get are applying and getting into the second quintile of schools. And so on as demographics collapse.

The alternative is to admit foreigners. But even foreign demographics will collapse eventually.

I'm really looking forwards to the buddy comedy movie about the chinese exchange student who goes to howard because his english was bad enough to confuse it for harvard....

Already starting to happen -- see Figure 1 near the end. The top quintile will probably do fine, and the larger schools in the next quintile (which is so far unaffected) can probably "build down" by consolidating campuses and programs. Schools lower than that and not part of a system don't have a clear path to survival; it seems inevitable that many of them will not survive.

I know at least in New York State, community colleges are already in trouble. I don't think any have closed but at least one lost its campus and had to co-locate with the nearby SUNY school.

ETA: See here for about how I expect this to go with most state university systems.

But even foreign demographics will collapse eventually.

Certain parts of Sub-Saharan Africa look like they're holding up for now, and if their demographics do eventually collapse, it probably won't be any time this century.

Random Chadian peasants will not be going to American universities, or anywhere else more than five miles from their mud huts. The TFR of the African Elites who might go to university abroad is still collapsing.

Random Chadian peasants will not be going to American universities, or anywhere else more than five miles from their mud huts.

Why not? Just create a program to recruit them, ship them over, and waive admissions requirements.

Ah, yes, I look forwards to the universities acquiring translators for a dialect which can only be learned verbally, sending recruiters to deep backwater villages that pay tribute to warlords who themselves owe allegiance to military juntas that don't bother to develop infrastructure to access the deep interior of the country. It might bring universities to develop zeppelins to deliver their recruiters places roads don't reach. Assuming local dictator #500 allows them to do it, and stays in power long enough for it to make any difference.

I'm not sure it's relevant yet

Bailouts for the education-managerial complex are always highly relevant.

In this case, bailing them out means "the government aids in forcing everyone they can into paying their salaries".

This is the primary driver for credentialism (and more recently, for handing out student visas like candy in countries with semi-private university systems). Legal requirements are a form of [corporate] welfare, it's just that corporation is a union of a large cross-section of society. And yes, it obviously robs the youth of valuable time and money to pay professors and administrators who have no business being there in the first place, just like everything else society does.

I expect other New World countries to nationalize universities as enrollment falls to enshrine the welfare program permanently.

Are there many near-financially-failing public (state/city) schools? I would expect the upper half of the university system to do okay regardless of student applications dropping. The failing schools will be the ones already struggling to put butts in seats, and I'm not sure exactly which those are. A number of small liberal arts schools have already folded. Are there borderline state schools unable to fill classes?

Are there borderline state schools unable to fill classes?

The most high profile example of this that I'm aware of is up in Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania State University is not exactly a state school, but it is one of the "big three" schools that are affiliated.

Three years ago they announced a hiring freeze. It's nominally still active at the end of 2025. I know some people who work there who say that their teams have been reduced by more than half simply through attrition.

Earlier this year, they announced that they will be closing seven of their branch campuses. Students who are still attending them will be given financial assistance and priority admission to attend other schools.

The enrollment cliff is real, and it scares the hell out of higher ed administrators.

Sources: Hiring freeze, campus closure

However: This document indicates that each of the seven satellite campuses being closed had fewer than 800 students. The dire situation at those satellite campuses doesn't really reflect the university as a whole, whose main campus enrolls 49,000 students and has not seen its enrollment fall over the past ten years.

The rearward looking CW angle is too obvious; DEI, affirmative action, grade inflation in High Schools and a "no child left behind" attitude. I'd sprinkle on some helicopter-parent pressuring as well. For those of you interested in that angle, I await your hopefully hilarious takes.

How much of that changed over the 2020-2025 period being examined, though? Race based affirmative action has been banned by California's constitution for almost 30 years. Not to mention the Supreme Court's own decision in 2023. No Child Left Behind, as an educational slogan, goes all the way back Bush's first term.

The report itself gives three contributors to the phenomena:

  1. Learning loss from the pandemic decreasing students' retention and preparedness.

  2. The move away from standardized tests to GPAs making it more difficult for admissions officers to asses student's actual capabilities.

  3. For UCSD specifically, a large increase in admission rates for students from LCFF+ schools, which the report describes as:

The subset of California public schools in which more than 75 percent of the school’s total enrollment is composed of students who are identified as either eligible for free or reduced-price meals, or English learners, or foster youth

#2 seems obvious to me. The committee seems to agree, judging by their recommendations. Giving up their best predictor of math ability had consequences.

Expect this to get wielded as a cudgel against anything that might possibly be called DEI.

Expect this to get wielded as a cudgel against anything that might possibly be called DEI.

A somewhat deserved one, as DEI advocates have often claimed standardized tests are racist and pushed for test-optional policies. For example this from the NEA, or Inside Higher Ed.

Agreed. I should have elaborated.

When UC and others decided to cancel standardized tests in the wake of COVID and/or Floyd, various people said it was going to harm math ability in the incoming classes. They were right, of course, and should be recognized as such.

The ones I’d rather not credit are the Chris Rufo types, who are happy to crucify the College Board for anything and everything except the SAT. Same for the overlapping group of anti-credentialists. Really, this is a big win for one of the pillars of the college application industry.

Oh, and I guess I expect the scientific racists to run with this result, too. Causation be damned.

The ones I’d rather not credit are the Chris Rufo types, who are happy to crucify the College Board for anything and everything except the SAT.

Do they deserve such crucification? Even if not, if Rufo was right on this point, he deserves credit.

Oh, and I guess I expect the scientific racists to run with this result, too. Causation be damned.

Assuming you mean actual William Shockley style "color coded by nature" scientific racism and aren't just smearing around slurs towards anyone who believes in HBD... well, the DEI people pretty much handed this to them. They said the test was racist, they got rid of the test, the accepted applicants were dumber, racism works.

Assuming you mean actual William Shockley style "color coded by nature" scientific racism and aren't just smearing around slurs towards anyone who believes in HBD.

As I understand it, William Shockley was his era's equivalent of modern HBD wonks, being consistently polite and sufficiently apologetic with his message. He was probably coarser with his exact phrasings than you could get away with now, but he was still closer to Charles Murray than William Luther Pierce.

Not that it really matters how polite you are, anyways. "[Your race] intrinsically sucks" is never going to be a popular message, and I'm always bemused by people who appear to think that the normalization of HBD isn't RaHoWa-complete.

Shockley was widely known as an asshole in his professional career. And he actually said "Nature has color-coded groups of individuals so that statistically reliable predictions of their adaptability to intellectual rewarding and effective lives can easily be made and profitably used by the pragmatic man-in-the street." so no, I do not believe he was "sufficiently apologetic" with his message.

Not that it really matters how polite you are, anyways. "[Your race] intrinsically sucks" is never going to be a popular message, and I'm always bemused by people who appear to think that the normalization of HBD isn't RaHoWa-complete.

It's actually been a popular message for years now, for some values of "[Your race]" -- in particular, "white". Which means there's even less reason to put blinders on to real racial differences -- it's co-operating with defectbot. The anti-HBD crowd is going to Notice places where other races have an advantage, deny places where white people have an advantage, and make up shit to slur white with being inherently oppressors. If this means Racial Holy War, so be it; it beats Racial Surrender Without A Fight.

How much of that changed over the 2020-2025 period being examined, though?

A lot changed. UC went SAT optional in 2020, and UC had a big push on LCFF at about the same time. I am just going to quote from the report (link below) subsections on your items 2 & 3:

In 2020, the University of California Board of Regents, against the advice of the report by the Academic Senate’s Standardized Testing Task Force (STTF), voted to eliminate the SAT and ACT from admissions consideration. Beginning with the cohort entering in 2021, standardized test scores were no longer used in the admissions process.

System-wide changes in LCFF+ Admissions and Enrollments (2019-2024). According to the UCOP Annual reports on LCFF+ admissions and enrollment, between 2019 and 2024, the number of LCFF+ students applying to at least one UC campus grew modestly, from 27,370 to 29,577 (Table 4a). In contrast, the number of LCFF+ students admitted to at least one campus rose more substantially, from 15,829 to 21,634, driven by an increase in admit rates.

I think getting rid of the SAT makes admissions particularly tough. If you look at Table 3 in the UCSD report in 2024 the high school math GPA of a UCSD Math 2 admit (Math 2 is middle school math) was 3.65. The high school math GPA for Math 10 (calculus I) is 3.74. Really hard to get a math competence signal from high school math grades.

Race based affirmative action has been banned by California's constitution for almost 30 years. Not to mention the Supreme Court's own decision in 2023. No Child Left Behind, as an educational slogan, goes all the way back Bush's first term.

Nobody at UC cares if affirmative action is banned. They do it regardless, with the explicit purpose of increasing minority enrollment.

"No we aren't doing affirmative action, we just lowered the admission standards from high schools with lots of minorities because of our equity concerns."

https://senate.ucsd.edu/media/740347/sawg-report-on-admissions-review-docs.pdf

I wonder how much of this has to do with viewing the university as a monolith. I believe this may be a case of increased enrollment in 'underwater basket weaving' majors giving an impression that the rigor for STEM courses has gone down.

It has traditionally admitted kid from middle to upper middle class families that maybe weren't deeply thinkers

UCSD is a lot more reputed in my circles (Bio, CS, Engg). UCSD is known for being the most academically rigorous and nerdy among the tier 1 UCs (UCLA is smart party kids. Berkeley is smart hustlers, UCSD is nerds). By research output, UCSD is the world's 4th best university to study CS, above MIT or Stanford. It is top 10 in the world for bio-tech (Top 5 in the US).

UCSD is an elite school by every metric. Arguably better than most Ivy League schools at every field that will define the future (silicon, tech, biotech). Among international students, it's incredibly competitive to get into. In my university's graduating class, couple of students got into graduate programs there (my school needed at least top 1 percentile national scores to get in) and only the university gold/silver medalists got acceptance letters. Practically all of them had perfect quantitative scores on the GRE.

This contrast confuses me. How can a university become increasingly more selective and lower the bar at the same time ?

A screened major is a major that has significant enrollment pressure and is growing quickly. Any student who meets the screening criteria will be allowed to declare the major

What programs have selective majors on our campus?

  • Data Science
  • Public Health
  • Jacobs School of Engineering – Bioengineering, Chemical Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

I think I found the answer. Certain majors are considered 'selective' and students are not allowed to switch into these majors later during their undergrad. It is no surprise that this covers all majors for which UCSD is considered an 'elite school'.

This model is similar to Europe, where getting into a top school is trivial, but a majority of students are weeded out through rigorous freshmen courses. It gives the impression of egalitarianism, while maintaining the high bar necessary to survive in difficult majors. There seems to be a class system emerging at these universities. The name of the university will mean little unless paired with the major that the student completed.

This model is similar to Europe, where getting into a top school is trivial, but a majority of students are weeded out through rigorous freshmen courses. It gives the impression of egalitarianism, while maintaining the high bar necessary to survive in difficult majors. There seems to be a class system emerging at these universities. The name of the university will mean little unless paired with the major that the student completed.

There is a bit of this but its even more that specific programs/majors at specific schools are prestigious. Getting into the school itself isn't necessarily a great feat (unless it's tiny and prestigious, so that the program and the school is the same thing), getting into the prestigious programs/majors at the prestigious school is. People are often not allowed to switch "majors" either, you'll have to reapply and keep whatever credits that are applicable.

Math isn't a great proxy for Iq anymore.

Many college kids can learn a computer game in an evening, order stuff online, backpack on another continent and drive a car through rush hour traffic. Yet they can't do long division which only requires repeating four simple steps. Someone who is mentally incapable of learning 332423/234 after 12 years of math training stands no chance when it comes to being able to buy cinema tickets in an app in five minutes or using a self checkout machine. People claim to be too low Iq to learn the times table yet are capable of memorizing other things.

School for kids under the age of 10 is effectively a play school with low standards, few kids being held behind and a culture of it being ok not to aquire the skills. Kids who don't know kindergarten to fourth grade math get passed along and get put in a class where they are taught material that requires skills they don't have. Math is one of the toughest subjects to skip chapters in. If you haven't mastered one chapter in the book the next chapter is impossible. Kids develop an identity of being bad at math and society accepts this instead of forcing them to repeat the basics until they have mastered it.

Math isn't a great proxy for Iq anymore.

To be fair, as a math enthusiast, I really dislike how high school "math" worked, which was mostly just training kids into executing algorithms, most of which have no application in real life for almost anyone.

Numeric skills were essential in the era before computers for a lot of people. Today they are not of much practical relevance. I dearly hope that anyone who encounters 332423/234 in their professional life will have the good sense to use a computer instead of trying long division.

I mean, basic numericy is essential. If you only encounter numbers as things which you enter into your calculator, you will not have a good grasp on them. So most of elementary school math is probably fine.

But mostly of what follows was 20% motivated by requirements of science classes, 20% stuff people should probably know, and 59% pointless algorithmic wankery for its own sake.

Take long division of polynomials, which is just long division on steroids. Now, there is a lot of interesting theory for sure, how the polynomials form a ring and how you can algorithmically factor out one known root. But this is not what we focused on. Instead, we solved toy problems "Here is a cubic polynomial. You magically know that x=3 is one root. Find all the roots."

Being able to solve quadratic equations is probably ok, because they often pop up in toy physics problems, but boy did we spend a lot of time on that. Just another pointless monkey-training thing.

Likewise linear systems of equation and Gaussian elimination. Again not completely pointless, but trained to the point of pointlessness.

Or take the unit about other bases than 10. There are only two cases here with any practical relevance -- base 2 to understand how computers work and base 16 which is commonly used to represent binary numbers. Of course base 16 was judged to hard for us poor kids, and while base 2 appeared occasionally, nobody thought to teach us about bitwise operations and shifts (never mind 2-complements).

Speaking of the failure of school to teach much more relevant CS topics, IEEE 754 came out in the year I was born. You would be forgiven to think that a school preparing me for a life where floating point numbers are everywhere would have tried to teach what catastrophic cancellation means and how to avoid getting wrong results when using calculators. But no, the only accommodation made to the existence of computers was that instead of having me find pointless analytic roots of quadratic functions was that instead they trained me to use my TI-82 to find pointless numerical roots of more general functions.

Mathematics is all about proving theorems, so you might think that I liked the section about induction more, but the opposite is the case. You take a beautiful mathematical concept and turn it in another rote exercise. "Take this pointless sum formula and apply the stored algorithm 'induction' to 'prove' it."

The TL;DR version of this whining about high school math is that basically, the test questions do not require you to think. It is sufficient to be able to apply the correct algorithm learned by rote. With any real world problem, it is very unlikely that you will have an algorithm in the cache which you just have to apply, apart from "write down the problem, think really hard, write down the solution".

If we want to torture students with pointless intelligence-linked tasks, my suggestion would be to get rid of 'math' and substitute puzzles such as Sudokus. At least when trying to solve NP-complete puzzles, you sometimes have to stop and think, or try different ways to attack the problem. Which is all not the case for typical high school math problems.

I dearly hope that anyone who encounters 332423/234 in their professional life

Actually, this isn't too hard if you note that both the numerator and denominator are multiples of 13, and so it reduces to 25571/18, which (if you need it as a mixed number) is much easier to compute as being 1420 and 11/18 — or 1420.6111…

Then again, I'm someone who has a habit of trying to mentally decompose various integers I encounter into their prime factorizations, basically for fun, so…

(I'll also compute square roots by hand from time to time, just to keep my skills sharp.)

It's worth being able to guess that this is about 1500, but probably not much more than that.

I'll also compute square roots by hand from time to time, just to keep my skills sharp.

Based, but I personally don't find it very fun once the numerators and denominators of the approximating fractions start exceeding three digits.

the numerators and denominators of the approximating fractions

I think we might be using different algorithms. I generally use the "long division method" — though I admit that for later digits it mostly reduces to increasing amounts of tedious multiplication and subtraction. Do you use Heron's method?

Do you use Heron's method?

Yes.

Actually, this isn't too hard if you note that both the numerator and denominator are multiples of 13

How the fuck do you notice that? I know how to tell if a number is a multiple of 2 (last digit is even), 3 (all digits add up to a multiple of three), 4 (last two digits are divisible by 4), 5 (last digit is 0 or 5), or 6 (divisible by both 2 and 3). But not 13.

Okay, looking it up, there are divisibility rules for 13, but none I ever learned. Do you seriously have one memorized?

How the fuck do you notice that?

Well, first I factored the denominator into 234=2*9*13. The tests you mention quickly ruled out 2 and 3 as divisors of the numerator, so that leaves trying 13.

Now, in this case, a used a particular divisibility rule that works for numbers with 4-6 digits, which is based on the fact that 1001=7*11*13 is a multiple of 13. Thus, if you "split" the number into its last three digits — in this case, 423 — and the preceding 1-3 digits before that — in this case, 332 — and take their difference, then the original number is divisible by 13 if and only if this resulting difference is also a multiple of 13. In this case 423-332=91=7*13, so it's divisible by 13; a bit of mental long division gives 332423= 25571*13.

(To explain in slightly more mathematical detail, I'm essentially taking 332423 and subtracting 332*1001=332332 to get 91, and since 332332 is a multiple of 13, 332423 and 332423-332332 are thus equivalent modulo 13.)

I also know divisibility tests for 7 and 11; the latter is particularly simple: add the two sets of alternating digits, then take the difference of those two sums; if that is also a multiple of 11 (including 0), then so is the original number.

Ex. 120681: 1+0+8=9, 2+6+1=9, 9-9=0=11*0, so it's divisible by 11 (note we also see at the same time that the digits all sum to 9+9=18=9*2, so 120681 is also divisible by 9). Much as the "sum up the digits" test for divisibility by 3 and 9 derives from 10^n ≡ 1 mod 9 (and thus also mod 3), this test for divisibility by 11 derives from 10 ≡ -1 mod 11, and thus 10^n ≡ (-1)^n mod 11.

Edit: fixed asterisks used for multiplication signs.

Or take the unit about other bases than 10. There are only two cases here with any practical relevance -- base 2 to understand how computers work and base 16 which is commonly used to represent binary numbers.

This is octal erasure

Damn right it is.

In a world where a byte is 6 or 9 bits, octal would be useful. But for obvious reasons world length tend to be powers of two. So we want a basis of 2^(2^n) for some n. The two choices closest to the base widely used by humans are n=2 (base 16) and n=1 (base 4), which can represent a byte in two and four digits, respectively. Relatively speaking, base 16 is closer to base 10 than base 4 is, so it is the obvious choice.

Let us say you are searching for an IPv4 address in a byte-aligned data stream. In hexadecimal, it will always be the same sequence of eight digits, for example 0xc0a810ff. Converting it to dotted quad is simple, network byte order is big endian, 0xff is 255, 0x10 is 16, 0xc0 is 1216 which is 364 which is 192, which tells us that 0xa8 is likely 168.

Now let us try the same in octal. If an oct digit ends with the least significant byte, the string we are looking for is (0o)30052010377. Otherwise, it might also be (0o)60124020776 or (0o)140250041774. Three different representation for the same sequence of bytes! (Yes, you could also use 3 digits to represent each byte separately, at the cost that 0o,000,377 +1 is not 0o,000,477 but 0o,001,000. At this point, the gains over denoting your words bytewise in decimal a la 192.168.16.255 seem slim.)

There are two reasons why programmers in this century might want to be slightly more aware of octal notation than of EBCDIC. Traditional unix file permissions (and umasks) use octal. But using chmod 755 should probably be replaced by the more verbose chmod u=rwx,go=rx (or setfacl) in any case.

The other reason to be aware of it is that it is a pitfall in C, C++. While the prefix K&R chose for hexadecimal numbers, 0x does not collide with common usage elsewhere, they made the terrible decision that octal integer constants should be marked with a leading zero of all things. (I imagine they got into a lot of disputes at gas stations when trying to pay $0060 with a $50 bill.)

Python here does the sane thing and straightforward forbids leading zeros in integer constants, instead telling you to use the 0o prefix if you really want octals.

There was a short period in 2005-2012ish where FPGA programming languages like VHDL and Verilog had to work on so badly constrained environments that octal bases were worth the obnoxious overhead, but either none of them retained support or no one uses that support for normal code this decade.

It deserves to be erased.

I think this seems more of an explanation. Americans are increasingly allergic to serious sustained effort toward a long term goal. Some of it is the relatively instant gratification of our hyperstimulous laden society. Some of it is because America has a difficult time admitting that differences in ability exist and matter. Furthermore, academics is no longer valued. I mean we want kids to go to college, but we aren’t concerned about much beyond simple graduation with decent grades (which leads to the need for employers to find work arounds for jobs with actual skills required to avoid hiring a kid who graduated but learned nothing useful). Compared to Europe or East Asia, we are lazy in education.

Compared to Europe [...], we are lazy in education.

Nah, we're much the same. There are exceptions, but I suppose so there are over in America. The rule is: You go to university to get a degree. Learning something on the way is optional.

School for kids under the age of 10 is effectively a play school with low standards, few kids being held behind and a culture of it being ok not to aquire the skills. Kids who don't know kindergarten to fourth grade math get passed along and get put in a class where they are taught material that requires skills they don't have.

This, in my opinion, is the largest problem facing the modern US public education system: total collapse of standards for the lowest levels (and that level seems to be creeping ever higher over time). The compounding effect of a kid being passed ahead without learning the previous year’s curriculum is ruinous. On top of the direct problems of incapacity, it teaches kids that actually learning things in school doesn’t matter and so there’s no need to try, while also simultaneously teaching the more studious kids that any setback is a catastrophe that must be avoided at all costs (because if no one ever gets a C on anything then it must be really unforgivably bad). Similar problems with discipline/behavior only compound the issue further.

For example, you may have heard of the “Mississippi miracle”, where Mississippi public schools have gone from rock-bottom for reading skills to top-10 in the country in a very short time (and one of the only states to show improvement at all), and without any significant spending increase. There are two reasons for this, and they’re excruciatingly simple: they changed to a “back to basics” reading-and-writing curriculum focused on core competency at young ages and without assuming the kids were reading or being read to at home; and they made it significantly easier for schools to hold back students who weren’t reading at grade level.

Yet they can't do long division which only requires repeating four simple steps.

Holy crap, I just realized I don't know how to do long division anymore.

I'm not sure how I feel about this.

I've never really learned it and I'm an engineer that graduated with top grades 15-20 years ago. The only occasion I've needed it was during the SATs and it was easy enough to figure out during the test.

It's both useless and easy at the same time.

Well I majored in mathematics and I can't say I exactly recall the long division algorithm I was taught in high school either. I'm sure I could recreate it or something similar if I needed to. But that's the point - any time I've needed to divide two large digit numbers in the past 15 or so years I've used a calculator or computer because not only is it faster, it's also easier to verify correctness. People forgetting things they don't use isn't a bug of the brain, it's a feature (ugh, and now any time I use a "it isn't x, it's y" construction I worry about sounding like chatgpt). I'd only really be worried if I thought I'd lost the capacity to relearn long division. I haven't yet, have you?

I had to relearn long division when we did polynomial long division ("What's the value of (x2 + 2x + 1) / (x + 1)", but usually with more terms) in one of my mathier courses, and man was that weird relearning almost the exact same thing with one tiny difference that makes it all crazy. I can't even remember what the exact application was.

Nowadays if I ran into a problem like that I'd find or buy a calculator to solve it for me.

My first inclination was to blame the COVID-era shutdown of schools. It fits the timeframe of the sharp decline well; the great down leveling of schools, although terrible, has been going on for decades and doesn't explain the cliff.

UCSD isn't just finding inability to perform high school math, though; it's had to start teaching remedial classes in middle school and even elementary school level math.

Maybe having no education in high school causes skills to decay? I wonder if these kids scored as competent in middle school math when they started high school; my bet is that they did, though probably marginally, and they've simply regressed.

We should have empathy for the kids, though: they've experienced actual harm, as opposed to the imagined abstract harm of disparate impact. Does give me an increased feeling of job security.

My wife and I were discussing something related yesterday: the question of the day was have we become Boomers, those most maligned of people.

Her little sister, a teacher, has made a series of bad decisions, and now wants to embrace a "tradwife" lifestyle. The issue is her boyfriend has no job. He's currently "studying" social media late into the hours of the night (as daytimes are reserved for chilling at the beach) so that he can become an influencer; he has no money and relies on her for housing, transportation, and food. They want to have kids ASAP and travel the world. And they are both in their early 30s.

We are not fans of this. But, are we just yelling at kids like old people now, not understanding all their challenges?

I don't know whether this is new or not, and whether it'd make me feel better or worse if it was new or not. All I know is that the kids are not all right.

Have her boyfriend join the Coast Guard and problem solved.

Maybe having no education in high school causes skills to decay? I wonder if these kids scored as competent in middle school math; my bet is that they did, though probably marginally, and they've simply regressed.

You know what surprises me? I don't think I've seen a woodworking video where the woodworker does their own math. I understand mathing fractional inches takes a little bit more effort than decimal cm, but it's all still powers of two. And yet, almost everybody I watch whips out a cell phone, relies on CAD software, or avoids mathing entirely by marking their workpieces against the actual dimensions of the partially completed project.

Apparently that last method is actually the best as compounding errors/imprecision always throw off your calculations. But I feel like my point remains.

Did none of these people ever learn how to do fractions? Even 10-20 years ago when our education system supposedly functioned? I doubt it. I doubt it's just students that are being cognitively mutilated.

If you want to see lots of math and geometry, look at the folks doing (manual) machine shop stuff. Things like "the drawing gives this weird dimension relative to another face over there: I need to include adjustments for tolerance over the separate steps to make all the intermediate features". Lots of concerns about reference faces, accumulating error, cutter geometry, and a fair amount of trigonometry.

Only professional cabinetry woodworkers are going to care about repeatability: for everyone else, a single piece of furniture only needs to fit together by itself, not have interchangable parts.

10 years from now, are we seeing a new sub-class of horrifically incompetent 30 year olds? If so, how does that change policy outcomes.

Infinity Indians. I'm not even joking.

I wish I could form an opinion on this, but there is simply no good data. Kids today are fucking stupid, sure, that's a data point. Is it because of screens? Is it room temperature IQ third worlders? Is it Asian cheating rings? Indian fake credentials? Decades of teachers being activist forwarding a social agenda instead of teaching the "Three R's"? All of the above? None of the above?

We'll never know, and we'll never fix it in time. The default option is to mass import workers from countries that at least fake teaching more convincingly, so that's the option that will be taken. This study won't contribute to any positive change what so ever, and will instead by another talking point behind the further ethnic cleansing of the nation.

Infinity Indians. I'm not even joking.

If schools like UCSD can't accurately gauge the abilities of American applicants, how can society accurately gauge the abilities of "Infinity Indians?"

Infinity Indians. I'm not even joking.

I've read so many of your comments but I never realized you were Justin Trudeau's alt account this whole time

I do sound like someone who's worn blackface, don't I?

You were a wonderful Aladdin and don't let anyone tell you otherwise <3

I seriously doubt that the Indians struggling in math courses. Indians struggle at writing and capacity for self-actualization. But, 'math' ? That's like saying the Brazilians struggle at football.

Given the nature of affirmative action, Asians at UCs (Indians or East Asians) are already more qualified than their peer whites or POCs.

What informs your negative perception of Indians ?

That's not what Coil meant - he meant that the "policy outcome" of the existence of "a new sub-class of horrifically incompetent 30 year olds" will be increased immigration from India to fill their slots in the economy.

Ah, that makes more sense. I am a 30 something Indian engineer in the US. So..... guilty as charged.

America's missing STEM kids is an incentive problem. Most STEM grads make average salaries, have a demanding job and are considered uncool. CS was the exception, but CS new grads have been in dire straits since 2023. Why would American kids pursue STEM degrees ?

Contemporary US is a nation of lawyers, salesmen and MBAs. America's smartest grow up admiring one of these 3. Ofc they don't want to be engineers. If they are nerdy and smart, they become doctors instead. More reliable money and higher status.

Even among tech billionaires, there is a reason why many are STEM program drop outs. It says : "Gaining expertise in this difficult subject is meaningless. I must transform into a salesman, make money and then I'll hire all the experts".

In the US, the Senate is about 50% Lawyers and the house is about 33% lawyers. In contrast, the Senate has 1 engineer and the house has 9. Now see China. 13/24 Politburo members are have engineering degrees and only 2/24 are lawyers. Tells you what the culture and people think is prestigious.

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