A recent opinion piece by Wall Street Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley relayed a disturbing fact: The University of California San Diego has a large number of students who struggle with basic math skills like rounding numbers or adding fractions.

UC San Diego is a well-regarded school, with U.S. News & World Report ranking it sixth on a national scale. So why is the admissions office accepting students who can’t pass a basic math exam, thereby requiring the school to offer remedial courses for elementary and middle school levels of math? Officers decided to admit ill-prepared students because they wanted to increase enrollment numbers.

Finley ponders, “Is this an indictment of A) the University of California’s admissions; B) public K-12 schools; C) U.S. News & World Report’s college rankings; or D) all of the above?” She answers, “If you chose D, you’re correct.”

Public school education tends to reward bad teachers who carelessly pass students along to the next grade without ensuring mastery of academic subjects. This has dumbed down the overall results.

U.S. News & World Report’s rankings judge colleges heavily on their graduation and retention rates; they don’t factor in standardized test scores for schools that don’t require them. UC San Diego is one of those schools that doesn’t require test scores, only GPAs.

That method, as Finley points out, has created inflated grading systems. College board tests no longer accurately reflect the academic readiness of students — and these shrinking standards are a national security issue.

If UC San Diego is scooping up non-college-ready students and churning them out with degrees they may or may not be able to use, the question arises: What is the purpose of college?

The purpose used to be to get an education. However, that ideal has slowly shifted over the years. Gen Z’s motivation for college seems to be purely hedonism — they go off to a school to satiate their fleshly desires. Sadly for them, lesbian dance theory isn’t a marketable degree, nor is it an education.

At the end of the day, most colleges are perpetrating a scam on their students. They are literally making young adults pay for courses they should have mastered in elementary, middle, and high school.

This degrades the overall value of colleges and universities. Which, ironically, is why students were clamoring for Joe Biden to force taxpayers to foot their student loan bills. To them, their education wasn’t an investment; it was a financial burden. Too bad they can’t connect the dots.

A recent NBC poll solicited opinions on whether going to college was worth it. The results were that only 33% of respondents believe it is. That’s a huge shift. In 2013, 53% believed college was worth it. So in just 12 years, the positive perception of college’s value has dropped 20 points.

To some extent, colleges are bearing the brunt of the failed K-12 public school system. Furthermore, they’ll be put out of business if something doesn’t change soon. And no, the solution isn’t to import smarter students from abroad.

Public schools, as they are designed now, are incentivized to push students through rather than ensure they have mastered the concepts. Moreover, COVID-era online schooling exposed the utter lack of academic learning, as well as the rampant political indoctrination.

Hence, parents are pulling their kids out of public schools. Since 2020, homeschooling has skyrocketed. Johns Hopkins University School of Education’s Homeschool Hub recently reported that in 2024-2025, the number of parents opting to homeschool increased at an average rate of 5.4%. In fact, a little over a third of U.S. states reported that the number of families opting to homeschool was their highest yet.

With colleges conning uneducated kids into spending thousands of dollars on remedial courses in pursuit of a degree that they may not even be able to use, it’s no wonder that homeschooling and the trades are on the rise.