The shocking rise of Gen Z college freshmen who can’t even do middle school math

The number of Gen Z college freshmen who are entering universities without high school math skills is skyrocketing — as SAT scores are plummeting, a stunning new report has found.

Even more shocking — many of the students can’t even do middle-school level math, meaning their skills are fifth grade or below.

Experts say this phenomenon, combined with steadily rising high school graduate rates, show that the country is suffering a massive grade inflation problem.

The University of California San Diego, for instance, has reported a staggering 30-fold increase in the number of students unable to do basic arithmetic over the last five years.

“A lot of data in education is subject to manipulation. You can raise graduation rates. You can give a kid a grade he or she may not really have earned,” said Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow and education expert with the American Enterprise Institute.

“You can literally declare a kid a graduate.”

“The incentives are in the system to make ourselves look good,” he told The Post. “High GPA, high graduation rate, etcetera — when it’s a mirage.”

The UC San Diego example is particularly stark. Just 30 of the school’s incoming freshmen had below high school level math skills in 2020. But in 2025 that number rose to 900, the Atlantic reported, citing a shocking November study released by faculty.

That’s one in eight incoming freshmen who are unable to meet basic high school math standards — for a school that takes just 30% of applicants.

All of the students also have to have passing grades in high school math curriculum required by the University of California school system.

Of those 900, an even more 70% of them — one in 12 members of the incoming class — couldn’t do middle school level math, the report found.

“At our campus, the picture is truly troubling,” the report read, describing the school’s incoming class as “increasingly unprepared for the quantitative and analytical rigor expected at UC San Diego.”

“The problem is serious and demands an immediate institutional response,” the report added.

It’s not just UC San Diego that’s seeing the problem — schools across the UC system and across the country have also seen failing math proficiency, the Atlantic reported, with basic writing and language skills also deteriorating to below high school standards.

The school attributed its problems to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic — the current entering class would have had a large portion of its high school experience affected by lockdowns — along with the elimination of standardized testing, and increased admissions from marginalized schools.

But one factor cited was also grade-inflation, a practice widespread across the country where teachers and administrators arbitrarily boost students’ grades to meet state or federal graduation rate requirements in order to receive funding.

The practice boomed after the 2002 Bush-era No Child Left Behind act, which required states to track graduation rates and improve them by year or else face sanctions — but often just ended up with administrators devising ways to game the system to keep afloat, according to the Economist.

That kind of behavior has resulted in an graduation rates increasing by more than 10% over nearly the last two decades, rising nationally from 74% in 2007 to 87% in 2020.

But students graduating didn’t necessarily mean they were learning — average SAT scores across the country dropped by nearly 100 points over the same period in a direct inverse of the graduation rate, the Economist found.

And the people who are being hurt are the kids who have been allowed to move through such flawed school systems, experts say.

“You can’t fool the workplace,” Pondiscio said.

“If you graduated high school and didn’t really earn it, that catches up to you in the workplace.”

“This is not the kid’s fault,” he added, “They didn’t ask to be put in that situation.”

“Shame on the adults who put that kid in the position of having to use these mechanisms to finish.”