The Problem at the Heart of US Education

No plan for the kids who can't

Author

James Shanahan
November 19, 2025

Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy! I’m James and I write mostly about education. I find it fascinating and at the same time maddening. Scholastic Alchemy is my attempt to make sense of and explain the perpetual oddities around education, as well as to share my thoughts on related topics. On Wednesdays I post a long-ish dive into a topic of my choosing. On Fridays I post some links I’ve encountered that week and some commentary about what I’m sharing. Scholastic Alchemy will remain free for the foreseeable future but if you like my work and want to support me, please consider a paid subscription. If you have objections to Substack as a platform, I maintain a parallel version using BeeHiiv and you can subscribe there.

Unsurprisingly, the report by UCSD’s working group on admissions is garnering more attention. If you haven’t seen it, or didn’t look at my last links post, the University of California San Diego has dramatically increased enrollment in remedial math, including teaching some basic math skills that students are expected to learn as far back as middle school. One of the more damning components of the report, though, is that students who are in remediation actually received excellent grades in their high school math classes, even advanced placement classes (students are not required to submit their AP exam scores so it’s possible they failed but the college cannot know this). Grades today do not communicate students’ abilities or knowledge, and this is a huge problem for colleges because students are admitted and enrolled lacking the necessary background to succeed.

Predictably, this is capturing the attention of liberal-oriented publications such as The Argument and The Atlantic, but I want to laud both of those write-ups because they are much more measured than what I’ve seen previously (e.g. panic over NAEP scores and such). Kelsey Piper, writes that there’s no easy “bogeyman” such as phones or Covid-19 school closures, even if each may play a part. She even takes a moment to defend the students:

OK, I’m sure some of them are [dumb} — I was pretty darn lazy during college myself. But I think it’s important to emphasize that many students in this boat are, in fact, smart kids. They are kids at the top of their class at large public high schools, kids who sought out honors track classes, worked hard in them, and got As in them.

I feel pretty confident that if we had actually allowed them to fail earlier, thereby providing them with an adequate education during middle and high school, they would, in fact, be prepared to excel in college.

These kids were not doing anything wrong. They were lied to. They were told that they were prepared for classes they were not prepared for. They were told that they were excelling in classes that they were not excelling in. They deserved better.

It’s important to frankly discuss how bad this situation is, but it need not and should not take the form of blaming students or assuming that they must be stupid or unworthy in some way. I think these “blame the student” takes hold sway out of some kind of just-world fallacy.

We don’t want to believe that the system could be so catastrophically bad as to fail even smart and hardworking kids. But yes, it absolutely can.

Take note of that just-world fallacy link because I’ve pointed out before that conservatives simply don’t care about every student and would prefer that opportunities only exist for a select few — how they select is always the rub and puts the lie to their supposed love of merit. My larger point here, though, is that we are in this situation because this is how we designed our education system. Accountability and chasing metrics are one big part of the story but I’ll also point to another big-picture problem we all face. When schools are “graded” on the number of kids graduating, taking and passing AP classes, and other narrow academic measures then they will orient themselves to surpass those metrics. If it’s a standardized test, then all the school will do is test prep. If it’s graduation rates, you can expect just about all the kids to graduate. If it’s parent satisfaction, they’ll bend over backwards to make parents happy. Why? Because the cost of not doing those things is usually that the schools are penalized or closed. Yes, even today, school accountability continues to exist. While I am deeply sympathetic to the problem here, I don’t think it’s as simple as bringing back NCLB-style test-based accountability nationwide but, at least if Democrats ever retake power, I expect that’s the direction we’re headed.

This is the system we designed

Liberals, and I somewhat include myself here, lack a good sense of what to do for kids who struggle in school. I’ve called them “the kids who can’t.” It may be a question of ability or engagement or opportunity or whatever your reason is but there will always be some population of kids who don’t succeed in school for one reason or another. While I tend to believe that population is smaller, rather than larger, it doesn’t change the fact that school just doesn’t work out for some people and for a wide variety of reasons. I’ve argued recently that some of this is a pathway problem, that we need to return to truly comprehensive schooling and develop flexible pathways for everything from advanced courses to shop class. For example, if you read what the admissions working group found, you see that these kids took reams and reams of honors and advanced placement courses, not just mathematics but literature and history and science, too.

This is the pathway problem, folks! The system is transparently designed this way. If you’re considered advanced in one area, you tend to be placed into advanced classes all around. As far as I know, this happens for three reasons. First, it’s easier to schedule a whole school if all the advanced kids are moving together as a single block. We shouldn’t discount practical incentives like these. Second, schools look better both to the public and to accountability regimes if they have greater advanced course enrollment. Third, parents like it and feel it makes their kids more competitive college applicants (and potentially lets them save money by skipping college classes, can’t ignore the value proposition). So, the kid who loves writing and literature will end up in Honors A/B Calc despite not caring about it at all and, perhaps, not having much in the way of strong math skills. The kid who is a diehard STEM kid taking advanced math and science will automatically be enrolled in AP European history even though he doesn’t give a lick about it. It’s kind of insane, if you think about it, to be graduating high school students who are, in terms of college credit acquired via AP tests, already college sophomores. It’s even more insane to consider, as the UCSD report tells us, the dozens of kids per advanced class who do not have advanced knowledge and skills but get strong grades anyway.

And that brings me to the bigger question here: what do we do with the kids who can’t? Clearly there are a bunch of kids enrolled in advanced classes who don’t need to be there and don’t meaningfully benefit from that level of instruction. At the same time, we’ve built schooling into our society in such a way that taking away those advanced classes is seen as a recipe for precarity. If these kids aren’t passed along and given a leg up on admissions to decent colleges, they won’t have the kinds of opportunities their families expect them to have. Being “forced” to attend, say, a California State college as opposed to a college in the UC system is, for many students and their parents, the difference between a good life and struggling to get by. While this is all based on perception, college grads of less selective colleges still do well, those perceptions drive behaviors and policies. It is, though, clearly untenable and we should lower the stakes of education so that people don’t see it as the only pathway to a good life.

What happens to the kids who can’t?

We cannot forget that we’re really only talking about, roughly, the top quarter of students — UCSD has a ~25% acceptance rate, falling into the merely “Extremely Selective” category as opposed to the “Most Selective” category. What’s happening with the other 75%? We have to disambiguate a little bit. Kids who go to college at all can expect to out-earn high school graduates, even if they get those much-maligned humanities or social science degrees.

The median student still sees a “premium” for going to college.

people with college degrees tend to like their jobs better (that College Board report talks about this). And people with college degrees tend to marry people who also have college degrees (though this trend seems to be waning), and tend to stay married more often (probably in part because they are wealthier), which is all good for household finances, kids, and life satisfaction.

She also reviews a few other articles and it’s pretty clear that the monetary benefit is falling over time, making the costs of college increasingly hard to justify solely in monetary terms. Yet, we’re still missing what happens for people who don’t go to college. About 40% of high school graduates never attend a college and their lives look bleaker than the total lifetime income calculations would lead us to believe. In part, because people who do not go to college are living increasingly shorter lives.

Case & Deaton, of “deaths of despair” fame give us a litany of reasons:

Why is this happening in America? We and others have documented an increase in corporate power relative to workers, which includes the decline of competition, the decline of unions and their ability to raise wages for workers without college degrees and the decreased mobility of workers from less to more successful places.

Other rich countries have been less prone to creating an elite class out of the college educated, while the United States has designed a system that too often works for itself but not for working-class Americans. They have been increasingly excluded from the local and national power that once came with unions and have lost good jobs and wages to excessive health care costs, globalization and automation. Furthermore, the children of the elite rarely serve in the military and increasingly hoard places in top selective colleges.

Unhealthy behaviors are more common among people without college degrees, but those behaviors can often be traced to the environments in which the individuals live, lack of work and community decay. Another factor is those without degrees being targeted by the pharmaceutical industry in the first phase of the opioid epidemic. The destruction of good jobs for less-educated men also helps explain much of the decline in stable two-parent families among non-college-educated men and women. We have also increasingly come to believe that a college degree works through often arbitrary assignation of status, so that jobs are handed out not on the basis of necessary or useful skills but by the use of the degree as a hiring screen.

This is what our education system is optimized to support. The media ecosystem is more concerned with the math skills of admitted students at extremely selective universities than it is with the seemingly deadly failure to support non-college grads. Understandable given the composition of our media. And, yes, both things can be a crisis, but I think we have to recognize that the last twenty to thirty years of education policy are a product of a labor market and economy where non-college grads die early and often. Because the stakes of attending college are reasonably considered life-or-death, we oriented reforms around pushing kids into college as a way of improving their… well… survival.

Making the irrational rational

If we put all of this together, the school behaviors we have now starts to look very rational. California graduation rates are at record highs right now. Kids rarely fail classes and, as we’ve seen in the UCSD brouhaha, even kids completing advanced coursework may lack important foundational skills. Everyone complains that we’re just passing kids along or that we have low expectations for students, but we have nothing for the flip side of these complaints. Our schools and policymakers know this. Kids who fail and drop out die. Kids who graduate but don’t go to college because they’ve got bad GPAs die. They are poorer, sicker, less happy, don’t marry, have less stable families, and then they die. So, really, what’s happening is that schools have decided to respond rationally to our society and save lives by orienting themselves around getting as many kids into college as possible. They may not see it this way but that’s really what’s happening here. Nobody is ignorant of the terrible life outcomes for non-college graduates so they’re working to get kids into college at all costs.

That’s the scholastic alchemy lesson for today. When you see something like what we see in the UCSD report it’s easy to throw your hands up in exasperation and ask how this possibly could have happened. Who thought it was a good idea to inflate grades? (Harvard, apparently) Who gave kids cell phones and laptops in class? Who let these teachers teach to the test? Who got rid of reading whole books? Who decided we’re going to do common core math? The list of questions goes on and on. Every few weeks there’s another outrage and another chorus of people demanding to know why the system they designed works the way it does. We live in a democracy and, by and large, we get the policies we seek. Take five goddamned minutes and look at the incentives we’ve laid out. If the choice is passing a kid who can’t work with fractions or him dropping out due to failure and therefore having a shit life and dying young, most people are going to choose passing the kid. All we’ve done is institutionalize this choice and layer it behind endless scholastic interventions for kids and punitive accountability policies that punish schools if kids fail. We’ve abstracted the choice being made and in doing so made it harder to acknowledge the sad reality of our society. So much societal wellbeing depends on getting any kind of college education that we have essentially turned schooling into our social safety net.

This has implications throughout the system as kids and parents have, more or less, come to expect students to pass because they showed up. In the process, grades lose any role they once had in communicating what students can do or what they know. Colleges, seeking to expand enrollments and get more kids access to that non-precarious lifestyle, don’t have the admissions tools to actually tell which kids will succeed and which will drop out. The best they can do, absent a strong filter mechanism like the SAT/ACT, is remediate and hope those kids go on to complete a degree. They mostly don’t. As I wrote in the last links post,

Far from increasing equity, we’ve developed a system that brings in unprepared students, separates them out for costly remediation, and leads to more of those same students dropping out. Are the underrepresented poor and minoritized students who were supposed to benefit from this policy better off now? Is it better that fewer students successfully pass through remediation go on to graduate normally? Are the ones who drop out “worth it” so that a few others succeed? What good, exactly, have we done here?

Well, at least for the kids who do stick it out, they have a shot at a better life than the peers who don’t attend college or who don’t complete their degrees. On average, they can expect to live longer, get married and stay that way, have higher career satisfaction, they’ll make more money (as will their spouses) and their kids will have stable homes. For this tiny fraction of students who persist to a degree after remedial classes, we’ve made a pretty good trade. So long as the stakes of higher education are a long happy, healthy life, we can expect schools and policymakers to continue pressing schools to get as many kids into college as possible.

Thanks for reading!