On August 12, 2026, five individuals seeking appointment or reappointment to the University of California (UC) Board of Regents appeared before the California Senate Rules Committee to testify on their nominations. Among them was former Chair of the Board of Regents Janet Reilly, who was a regent when the university system voted to phase out standardized testing for undergraduate admissions in 2020. When asked by Republican Senator Rosilicie Ochoa Bogh on the glaring issue of academic decline, Ms. Reilly responded:

The regents have spent a lot of time and resources … making sure that when students get to the University of California, they are supported … If they need tutoring, if they need advising, and if they need a summer bridge program … we are providing that.

Senator Ochoa-Bogh was referring to UCSD’s November 2025 report, Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions Final Report, which documented substantial gaps in incoming students’ academic preparation. Among its findings, roughly one in 12 incoming students placed below middle-school math levels. More than 25 percent of students placed into the lowest remedial math course but had nevertheless earned a 4.0 GPA in their high school math courses. The report also found significant remedial-math needs among students across a wide range of undergraduate majors.

Regent Reilly’s colleagues doubled down.

Gregory Sarris, appointed as a UC Regent in 2023 and seeking reappointment, blamed the lack of academic success among first-generation students on the fact that these students “are taking jobs to support themselves” and later on systemic inequities. Mr. Sarris then raved about the results of Bridge, a summer program designed to help incoming students transition to college, citing his personal experience with a Stanford Bridge program for Native American students. Chip Robertson, appointed by Governor Newsom earlier this year, said UC has “a moral obligation” to provide these remedial services to students as the Regents study whether to bring back the SAT or ACT.

At UC Berkeley, Summer Bridge offers transitional courses to incoming freshmen during the summer. Managed by UC Berkeley’s Student Learning Center, the program was founded in 1973 and has served more than 7,000 students. In 2026, Summer Bridge ran from July 6 to August 14 and offered three coursework pathways.

The six-unit pathway offers the following course combinations: African American Studies and Chemistry; African American Studies and Psychology; Biology and Mathematics; Chemistry and Mathematics; Chicano Studies and Chemistry; Chicano Studies and Psychology; Comparative Literature and Psychology; English and Psychology; Geography and Theater; and Mathematics (College Algebra) and Theater. The seven-unit pathway offers two additional combinations: Comparative Literature and Geography, and English and Geography. The eight-unit pathway offers two more: Biology, Chemistry, and Mathematics; and Biology, Chemistry, and Theater.

Summer Bridge is, at best, meant to be a temporary, supplemental resource that the higher education system can provide, often at taxpayers’ expense, to underprepared students. But the UC Board of Regents seems to have reached a quasi-consensus that remedial college coursework can do wonders for UC students without major reforms to reinstate objective academic measures such as standardized tests. This approach persists despite more than 3,000 UC faculty members having signed an open letter supporting the return of standardized testing in admissions.

Another strong point the Regents repeatedly drove home during their testimony regards unmitigated deficiencies in the K-12 pipeline. During the hearing, Rusty Areias, newly appointed to the Board of Regents in April 2026 by Governor Gavin Newsom, was blunter and more candid about the pitfalls of UC’s test-blind admissions in conjunction with academic failures. Areias, a former state assemblymember and prolific public opinion pollster, conceded:

The Academic Senate is studying [UC’s admissions policy]. I’ve gotten, I don’t know how many messages from physics teachers and others who are saying their students don’t know basic high school algebra … It didn’t surprise me when I heard it from physics teachers. But when I started hearing from social science teachers that kids can’t read and write, that got my attention.

Areias then shifted the blame:

That begs the basic question … We’re talking about bringing in college tutors to get kids up to speed. Why aren’t these kids prepared? What’s going on with K through 12?

A real issue, indeed. But it was emphasized in a way that sidestepped the responsibility that a broken college admissions process must also bear. Persistent deficiencies in K–12 education—a complex, longstanding problem attributable to failures in education policy, education politics, and cultural shifts—do not absolve a malfunctioning higher education system that has, for decades, incentivized racial balancing, grade inflation, and cheating in K–12 schools.

This feedback loop is evident at Mission High School in San Francisco, a low-performing high school that also boasts California’s highest acceptance rate to UC Berkeley. To put that in perspective, only 17 percent of Mission High’s 11th graders scored proficient or above in English, while 94 percent of its students failed the state math test. Yet, in the last academic year, the school had a 45 percent acceptance rate to Berkeley, with 34 of its 76 applicants gaining admission.

Can woefully unprepared students, admitted largely on the basis of inflated grades and racial preferences, sufficiently catch up through summer remedial courses? And if so, at what cost and with what trade-offs?

Zvezdelina Stankova, a UC Berkeley professor of mathematics and a signee to the previously mentioned open letter supporting admissions testing, gives a detailed comparison of math readiness at Berkeley in a recent San Francisco Standard op-ed. The picture comports with the UCSD report in tragically similar ways:

Before 2020, Berkeley administered a diagnostic exam to incoming Calculus I students. Between 2018 and 2020, 71% of roughly 2,200 students tested as ready or nearly ready for calculus. At the bottom of the distribution there was almost nobody. Just 0.14% tested below basic algebra.

After UC adopted test-blind admissions, the picture changed dramatically.

Among approximately 2,800 Calculus I students tested between 2021 and 2023 with a different diagnostic that measured proficiency in eight mathematical topics, the share who were ready or nearly ready for calculus (meaning, they had proficiency in five to eight subjects) fell to 51%, dropping to 44% by 2023. Most troubling, the bottom of the distribution exploded. Seventeen percent of students answered none of the eight diagnostic topics correctly. By 2022-23, more than one-third had severe math deficits, and the single most common score on the exam was zero.

Professor Stankova also retells a familiar tale of two high school students: one who was admitted to a top UC engineering program despite having weak academic credentials and another who was rejected by all UC schools despite acing Calculus II and other collegiate STEM courses through dual enrollment.

Two interlocking facts emerge from Stankova’s account, both of which challenge the Regents’ apparent confidence in remediation.

First, the crisis of academic unpreparedness is too systemic to be remedied with bandages. Relying on summer remedial programs is tantamount to bringing a knife to a gunfight. Second, and more fundamentally, one could infer from Stankova’s op-ed, with further support from the mounting legal challenges facing UC’s admissions system, that UC is intentionally passing over talented students in pursuit of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Regent Rielly testified that “we just cannot accept every qualified student who wants to attend the University of California.” But many qualified students have been passed over to create the appearance of an inclusive and politically correct student body. I sounded the alarm as early as January 2021 and again in early 2022.

Alas, even though professors cry out to restore academic integrity through the tests, the UC system won’t entertain significant admissions policy changes until fall 2028. While the bureaucrats and administrators hash out policy differences with faculty members and weigh academic calculations against political ones, nearly an entire generation of students, those admitted and those rejected, are being sacrificed at the altar of inclusive, remedial higher education.

Regent Reilly may not have realized that her opening statement at the Rules Committee only added insult to injury. She said: “We have to be careful not to compromise the quality of a UC education.” Well, Regent Reilly, the quality of a UC education has already been significantly compromised, precisely because decision-makers under your leadership have rejected pleas for merit and continued to drag their feet on necessary, overdue course corrections.

A stubborn refusal to confront abject academic failures with empirically proven, common-sense proposals for restoring merit, standards, and excellence is by no means a California problem. The dust from Harvard’s scandalous offering of remedial math for its freshmen is still settling. Now, the University of Michigan, another selective school with a long history of institutionalizing affirmative action, is also on the move. There, administrators have sidestepped the possible implications of decades of discriminatory admissions and recent academic dumbing-down by placing many of its freshmen on a pass/fail grading system.

A problem ignored, however, is not a problem solved.

Follow Wenyuan Wu on X.

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Janet Reilly was chair of the UC Board of Regents when it voted to phase out standardized testing for undergraduate admissions in 2020. John Pérez was chair of the board at the time. Reilly was serving as a regent and voted in favor of the change. The article has been corrected.