“Some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics,” Professor Zvezdelina Stankova writes in her op-ed published by The San Francisco Standard.
The purpose of the op-ed was not to shame university students but to describe the state of higher education at UC Berkeley after ACT scores and SAT scores were scrapped in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic.
UC Berkeley is famous for its low admission rate, which hovers at 10 percent, but the public university remains a “test-blind” campus despite years of pleas to bring back more rigorous admissions.
Over two-thirds of UC mathematics faculty members, including Professor Stankova, have signed an open letter urging the University of California system to reinstate standardized testing at Berkeley after MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and Yale have already done so.
Nicholas Giordano is a political science professor and higher ed fellow at Campus Reform. He told American Family News he could relate to the Berkeley professor’s “pain” over witnessing unprepared university students.
In his political science class, Giordano said, students couldn’t pass a citizenship exam because they have never read the U.S. Constitution or the Declaration of Independence.
“This is a big problem across all colleges, all universities,” he warned, “and it's because the K-through-12 system has completely collapsed and is not teaching students what they're required to know."
In the math professor’s op-ed, Stankova did her homework to back up her warning. Before 2020, a Berkeley calculus exam for potential students showed 71% of them were “ready or nearly ready” to study calculus. That number had dropped to 44% of prepared students by 2023, she wrote, and one-third of the students tested in 2023 had what the professor calls “severe math deficits.”
Many of those students are coming from California’s struggling public schools, where only 37% of students performed at grade level in 2025, she also pointed out.
Giordano told AFN well-prepared students will “rise up” to meet high expectations from their professors, but the universities view more students in the classrooms as a business model for collecting their tuition and fees.
“And then we're sending them out into the real world, thoroughly unprepared to tackle the challenges of the 21st century,” he warned.
