What the College Preparedness Debate Misses

I saw this going viral about the apparent lack of preparedness among today’s college students:

I'm not sure if others in higher ed are noticing a decline in student achievement this semester, but it's been pronounced in my courses–particularly freshmen. I have a 101 course where, for the first time in my 12 years teaching it, no student earned an A on an exam.

— David Alan Hughes (@davidhughes\_phd) September 30, 2026

This has become a constant refrain in the established media, too. “Kids these days” are over-reliant on AI and lack basic skills, as the narrative goes. It’s easy to find many headlines from the past few years, such as:

• The Atlantic: The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books — professors describe students arriving at college unable to handle the assigned reading.
• The Atlantic: ‘A Recipe for Idiocracy’ — about incoming college students struggling with basic math.
• New York Magazine: Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College — about students outsourcing their coursework to AI.
• Associated Press: US high school students lose ground in math and reading, continuing yearslong decline — about declining basic skills and college readiness.
• The Washington Post: AI is hurting students’ ability to think, educators say: ‘It’s the illusion of learning’ — educators question whether AI use undermines learning.

My argument is that this analysis misses the other extreme. The laggards get all the media attention, but people overlook the “right” tail of the talent distribution. I posit today’s smart kids are way ahead of their counterparts from decades ago (e.g., kids who are learning calculus at 10 and taking graduate courses at 16). Large numbers of lower-achieving students weigh down the median and mean. More people attending college means poorer preparedness on average, due to a Simpson’s paradox-type effect. A recent Reddit thread below illustrates the stark contrast between today’s brilliant kids and the stragglers, even within the same classroom:

Taking calculus in high school used to be considered advanced or special, but now, at least among students aiming for top colleges, it’s more like “meh.” I recall being one of three students in my senior class who took calculus at a local community college. This was considered advanced at the time, but now it’s pretty much par for the course among mathematically inclined, motivated applicants. Threads and stories abound on Reddit and elsewhere of high schoolers taking increasingly advanced courses. This is hardly reported by the media and left out of the debate.

As for actual evidence, only about 7% of high school graduates had completed calculus in 1990, compared to 16% in 2019, although it was slightly higher at 18% in 2009. The share of public high school graduates who took at least one AP exam went from 18.9% in 2003 to 37% in 2025.

Even that is not good enough. Today, standing out might mean doing well in math competitions or teaching yourself upper-level undergraduate or early graduate-level math. Or building GitHub projects that show what you can do. The bar seems much higher, with lower acceptance rates at top colleges and stiffer competition. Math competition problems, despite only requiring high-school-level math, are much tricker than your typical community college calculus assignment, requiring quickly finding subtle tricks or patterns within the strict time limit against other smart competitors. This makes top scorers much rarer and exclusive.

There is also the issue of confirmation and availability biases. Incessant, viral headlines claiming that college students are poorly prepared subconsciously implant the belief that young people overall are deficient in basic skills. Once people start looking for examples, they find them more easily while overlooking the high achievers. What would have been dismissed as a one-off occurrence becomes part of a broader trend or narrative. If you ask people about the quality of their healthcare, they may reach for examples of poor service. Just making people aware of something, such as news headlines and on social media, may make them more inclined to find examples of it. This is what it means when something becomes “a thing”–it means it has entered the public’s consciousness.

To win admissions arms race, today’s incoming freshmen at elite/top-50 schools are arguably better prepared or more qualified than ever, not less. For example, a recent viral tweet featuring JFK’s Harvard application essay was shared in jest to illustrate this contrast:

The literacy crisis is real. A friend sent me this: this is an essay that successfully got someone admitted to Harvard. pic.twitter.com/xXlU75tJnf

— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) September 21, 2026

In 1936, when the future 35th president enrolled at Harvard, this was considered a perfectly suitable essay. In the comments, many disparagingly likened it to something a sixth-grader could write, hardly befitting the hallowed halls of one of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. Others attributed his admission to favoritism, pointing to his father, Joseph Patrick Kennedy Sr., the Kennedy patriarch who built his fortune during the Great Depression. But if you look closely, his essay filled the allotted space on the application form; applicants were not expected to write long essays. As people noted in the replies, even sixth- and seventh-graders today write better than that:

This is how my son wrote essays in 6th grade. 😅

— Rhonda Rhoades (@NewWaveIngenue) September 21, 2026

To investigate a possible Simpson-like effect, one question is whether today’s incoming freshmen at elite, selective schools (e.g., MIT or Caltech) are less prepared than their counterparts from 30+ years ago. This is understandably hard to do: coursework and standards change, and a lot of the evidence is anecdotal. This makes the comparison susceptible to the various biases mentioned above.

But, on the other hand, there is also evidence that students at Princeton and other elite schools are less prepared, so the problem may be more widespread than just limited to low-ranking schools, although again, these assessments may be influenced by confirmation bias. It’s also easy to lose perspective on how far education has come despite everything that is also wrong with it. When sixth or seventh-graders today can write as well as a future president attending Harvard, I would call that progress.