Why It Can Be True That Students Are Both Smarter and Less Prepared – Grey Enlightenment

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I saw these stories going viral, all within the span of a few weeks:

I’m a professor at Berkeley. Bring back this requirement for entry.

and

Students are doing worse than you think

College Students Are Losing the Ability to Read

There have been a lot of stories lately about the apparent lack of preparedness among incoming college students. Five years later, we’re seeing the consequences of COVID-related learning loss and the ill-conceived idea of making the SATs optional. These stories tend to come in waves. In addition to the above factors, I think some of the surge in unprepared college students is an artifact of more people attending college, who decades earlier would have never attended; and second, more media coverage.

Well over a decade ago, by my estimate, at least half of my high school graduating class wasn’t proficient at math at all beyond the basics. The difference now is everyone is expected to attend college, so now teachers have to tailor their classes to accommodate these stragglers who decades ago would have never attended college. As the high school graduation rate approaches 100% as college preparedness falls, it’s clear that a high school diploma no longer signifies readiness for college.

Jeremiads about falling academic performance and the decline of learning date back as far as people have been keeping track of such things. A Reddit thread from 3 years ago asks, "How do we deal with the flood of unprepared students?" Or from US News in 2013, "High School Graduates Still Struggle With College Readiness," so this is hardly a new development.

This may sound dismissive, but I don’t think it’s possible to infer much from this data. I agree, broadly, today’s students are less prepared compared to, say, 20 years ago, but we’re talking a larger student body and other circumstances unique to today, so the comparison doesn’t tell us much. It’s also highly dependent on the school or other factors. There is a ton of granularity that is overlooked by these alarmist headlines. For example, how does one reconcile "college students who cannot do fractions" with the post-2020s surge in AP courses or high schoolers learning calculus or linear algebra? For example, the tweet below:

I work at a high school with a full load of college math offerings. It's pretty bonkers that I'll be teaching a few of my high school freshman about the Fundamental Theorem of Linear Algebra next week pic.twitter.com/DCGhyzBJ0z

— Mitchell Eithun (@mitchelleithun) May 13, 2022

I also agree with Richard Hanania that the supposed "end of reading" is the latest moral panic:

I believe that the "end of reading" discourse is a moral panic.

The Atlantic reports that 35% of high school students are proficient in reading.

Sounds bad. But it gives no historical context.

In 1994, it was 36%. The numbers have basically been flat for decades. pic.twitter.com/L5sTAdcqe2

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) July 9, 2026

It’s also hard to reconcile these stories with the hypercompetitive reality of today’s job market or elite college admissions. This is why these narratives are inadequate. For a given baseline of ability, decades ago it was indisputably easier to get into a good PhD program or publish a paper in a journal; anyone who denies this is ignorant of the current situation, or worse, lying or gaslighting.

After the Great Recession and especially post-COVID, society has become much more bifurcated between the "over-optimized top 1%," who you’re competing against for relatively few sought-after jobs and other positions and signifiers of status, "the middle," and the laggards at the bottom. If you want to be accepted into a good graduate program or land that dream quant or AI job, your competition are not going to be those kids who cannot do fractions. Rather, it’s going to be prodigies with GitHub repositories and winning math competitions.

It’s always to some extent been this way, but thanks to winner-take-all-markets, financialization, and trillion-dollar tech companies, the returns in terms of wealth and status of being in the top 1% are much greater, hence much more competition. But this is concurrent with large populations of underperforming groups. America is unique in the world in providing unlimited wealth and status if you’re talented enough. There is no OpenAI equivalent in Europe, or 7-figure comp packages.

A similar juxtaposition is seen on social media. On YouTube or Instagram there is a similar arms race to "get big" or as strong as possible, with viral content of people who are extremely fit, as America at the same time has among the highest obesity rates in the world and millions of people struggle with chronic illness due to bad lifestyles. The post-COVID economy rewards highly-specialized, technical knowledge, and this is seen in the trend of overprepared students, but these are dwarfed by...