www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZGGgxy6SNPAy9Hj7v/childhood-and-education-18-do-the-math...
1 correction found
That’s 12% of students at UCSD.
The 11.8% figure applies to UCSD’s incoming fall 2025 cohort, not to all UCSD students. UCSD had about 45,000 total students in 2025, so 12% of all students would be far larger.
Full reasoning
This mixes up incoming-student placement data with campus-wide enrollment.
UCSD’s math-placement report gives Fall 2025 total enrollment of the incoming group as 7,799, with 921 students (11.8%) in Math 2/3B. That means roughly 12% of the incoming cohort needed that level of remediation.
But UC San Diego’s official Common Data Set reports 45,087 total students in fall 2025 (34,442 undergraduates and 9,645 graduate/professional students combined). So saying this was “12% of students at UCSD” is incorrect. Relative to all UCSD students, 921 students would be about 2.0%, and even 1,000 students would be only about 2.2% — nowhere near 12%.
So the article takes a percentage that applies to one admissions cohort and mistakenly applies it to the university’s entire student body.
2 sources
- UCSD Department of Mathematics
Fall 2025 | Total Enrollment 7799 | Math 2 665 (8.5%) | Math 2/3B 921 (11.8%) | Math 2/3B/3C/4C 1283 (16.5%).
- Common Data Set 2025-2026
All Students: Total Total All students | Males 20,942 | Females 22,932 | Unknown 1,213 ... Total all undergraduates ... as of the institution’s official fall reporting date or as of October 15, 2025.