I worked at a surplus electronics store that was the closest one to a few California Community Colleges, a California State University and a University of California. Those are respectively the original two-year, four-year, and post-graduate school systems.

There was an inverse correlation between the level of the school and the students' understanding of electronics. The community college students usually knew what was going on, the students from the State University system sometimes needed an explanation of what should have been basics, and the UC students rarely had any clue what was going on.

Once a UC student showed up in a panic, because the control board for something in his final project had stopped working, and when he showed it to me I commented that it looked like the voltage regulator was fried. He gave me a blank stare and when I pointed it out his response was: "That's what that thing is?". This was a simple circuit board that he should have been able to design from scratch, and he couldn't even identify the components on it.

The open letter, signed by over 500 faculty from various UC sites, says "current admissions practices do not provide a sufficiently reliable check on mathematical readiness for STEM majors." "We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics," with 1 in 12 admitted UC San Diego students falling below middle school levels in math assessments.

"The current admissions metrics, based primarily on GPA and essays, can no longer reliably distinguish readiness for university-level STEM majors in an era of severe grade inflation and AI-assisted application essays."

Nobody could have predicted