What DEI has wrought. By Zvezdelina Stankova at The San Francisco Standard.
Racial justice, no doubt:
In March, two California families opened college admissions decisions that should make anyone who cares about higher education stop and think.
One student — I’ll call him Elias — was admitted to a top University of California engineering program. His family was thrilled though surprised. Math had been his weakest subject in high school, but they assumed the university had seen something they hadn’t.
Another student — Nadia — watched rejection after rejection arrive from UC campuses. One turned her down even though she had earned A’s there in Calculus II and other college-level STEM courses through concurrent enrollment. …
UC Berkley still hasn’t reinstated standardized tests, and the results are disastrous for subjects involving knowledge and thinking:
I teach mathematics at UC Berkeley. Three days a week, I stand in front of lecture halls with 500 to 1,400 students. By the second week of the semester, I already know who is in trouble. Some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics. Office hours that should be spent discussing integrals instead become lessons on fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school.
That is why this spring and summer, thousands of faculty members across all 10 UC campuses — including more than two-thirds of UC’s mathematics faculty — signed open letters urging the system to restore the SAT and ACT in admissions. Five Nobel laureates joined us, along with professors from across the university, including Beatriz Manz, Berkeley’s first Latina full professor.
We did so because what an admission letter is supposed to mean — that a student is ready to attend the school — no longer matches what we see in our classrooms….
Many peer universities have since reconsidered. MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and Yale all suspended testing requirements during the pandemic. All have reinstated them. Across the Ivy League, similar reversals are underway. UC [the public university system in California] has moved in the opposite direction.
They call it the math collapse. The next generation of engineers and doctors. Ideology will have to concede to reality eventually, but today is not that day.