Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) is capable of deciding that he wants to run to become the leader of the free world, but the California governor can’t take a stand on a question as simple as whether the University of California system ought to heed the warning from 1,200 professors that they “now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields.”
When asked about the open letter from the UC professors, who include five Nobel laureates and seven of the system’s nine mathematics chairs, Newsom shrugged, smiled, and equivocated.
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“Show me the data,” said the noncommittal Democrat. “I have feelings about this; there’s anecdotes about this, but I want to see the data.”
If Newsom had read the letter, of course, he would already know the data. A landmark UC San Diego report on admissions last year found that the number of students who had not achieved high school-level mathematics proficiency increased 30-fold in the five years since the UC system stopped requiring standardized testing as part of its admissions process. Of those students, 70% did not meet middle school math proficiency standards.
At UCSD, which Forbes ranked as the third-best public university in the nation, one-eighth of the 2025 incoming class did not meet middle school math standards, necessitating the creation of a remedial math course reviewing elementary-school arithmetic. On a test given in the remedial math class, a quarter of the students could not solve 7 + 2 = x + 6. And the majority of those remedial math students were not humanities majors, but rather science, technology, engineering, or mathematics majors.
The standardized-testing experiment did not result in smarter students, nor did it produce a more diverse student body under any meaningful definition of the term. In the first four years of the new regime, the share of Asian American admits fell from 35% to 33%, and white admits fell from 21% to 18%, while the share of black admits rose from 5% to 6% and Latino admits rose from 36% to 39%.
MAMDANI’S WAR ON AFFORDABILITY
The rest of academia has quietly admitted the failure of 2020’s collective psychosis, with the entire Ivy League once again requiring standardized test scores for applicants. Since President Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office, the Education Department has explicitly warned that the federal government considers it illegal “for an educational institution to eliminate standardized testing to achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity.”
But Newsom, the governor of the Union’s largest state, doesn’t have an answer as to whether his 250,000-student university system should require SAT scores. Believe him, he just hasn’t read the data yet.
