Should top colleges admit students who can't do basic math?

Mad Libs: Barnum v. Piper

Welcome to Mad Libs. This is an irregular debate column where our columnists, contributors, staff writers, (or even you, dear reader) can duke it out over the big ideas we’re discussing in the metaphorical pages of this magazine.

This Mad Libs was inspired by staff writer Kelsey Piper’s piece “When grades stop meaning anything,” where she argued that due to myriad failings within the California education systems, a growing number of students with good transcripts were getting into a top state university while incapable of doing even basic math.

Matt Barnum is the ideas editor at Chalkbeat, where he writes a newsletter about the big debates and ideas shaping American education. This is the first in a series of copublished pieces with Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news site covering American schools. Barnum is worried that Piper is failing to engage with the upside of admitting less-well-prepared students to selective colleges.

Their full exchange is below.

- Jerusalem, Editor-in-Chief of The Argument

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Matt Barnum, editor and columnist for Chalkbeat Ideas

If a high school graduate struggles to do very basic math but manages to get good grades anyway, should they get into a good college?

By “struggles with basic math,” I mean they incorrectly answered the following: “Round the number 374,518 to the nearest hundred.”

A recent University of California San Diego report, which warned of rising remedial math rates, kicked off a fevered conversation on this question. It has even prompted an inquiry from the U.S. Senate. To Kelsey Piper at The Argument, the report amounted to a searing indictment of high school grade inflation and admissions standards at the UC system: “Instead, here is the absurd image that the report slowly and painstakingly paints: A number of high schools are awarding A grades to AP Calculus students who do not have any calculus skills and who would get the lowest possible score on the AP Calculus exam if they took it.”

I agree with Piper’s concerns about grade inflation, but I think she’s wrong to categorically suggest that UCSD shouldn’t admit students who need remedial help.

Piper argued that such students simply aren’t benefiting from a UCSD education. Their “outcomes are not good,” and she would “not bet on” their chances of graduating. The university report made a similar argument, saying that admitting underprepared students amounted to “setting them up for failure.”

I don’t think the evidence supports this.

Princeton economist Zachary Bleemer studied a policy from the 2000s that admitted students to certain University of California schools, including UCSD, based on their high school grades, without considering test scores. These students are similar to those who need remediation now: They were disproportionately low-income and their SAT scores were very low compared to others on campus.

So what happened? These low-SAT students were far more likely to complete a college degree on time compared to essentially identical students who did not get a chance to attend a selective UC school. They also earned more money as young adults.

Far from hurting these students, access to a top-flight UC school helped them quite a lot. If anything, they seemed to benefit more than their peers.

A naive analysis would miss this. The low-SAT students performed worse than their peers at UC, but they were more successful than they otherwise would have been had they attended a different college. Other research, including a major new study of Texas’ public universities, has found similar results.

Piper argued that underprepared students might be better off attending a community college — isn’t that the point of such schools, to remediate gaps in high school education? Yet here, again, the evidence calls this into question. Students’ outcomes appear to be worse if they are diverted from four-year colleges to community colleges, according to a rigorous 2022 study.

This research brought into sharp relief the trade-offs in the current UCSD situation and for universities across the country at a moment when high school students are graduating with weaker academic skills.