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A few weeks ago, an Academic Senate committee at UC San Diego shocked the country with a report on the rapidly declining math skills at their university, with The Atlantic generalizing the problem, stating, “American Kids Can’t Do Math Anymore.” Unfortunately, Stanford's policies of recent years may make us closer to the UCSD debacle than we might think.
In 2019, the Future of the Major design team delivered a 32-page report to the university, detailing recommendations for curricular changes. In May of 2020, the Stanford Faculty Senate approved one of these proposed changes, a 100-unit cap on all majors. The explicit focus, stated in the first line of the report, was “ensuring that all majors are accessible to all students.”
Since the beginning of Stanford, a major required deep and rigorous knowledge of a chosen field, objectively measured by the university. For the committee, however, making majors more “accessible” meant disregarding objective metrics and lowering the barrier to entry, particularly to help students from high schools that were underserved or lacking AP Exams and transfer students. Practically, this meant that engineering majors would need to cut down their requirements to fit under 100 units. The result is a clear lessening of rigor in several departments in the name of combating “great social and educational inequality”.
As these decisions were being debated by faculty and the Stanford community, much was documented concerning the cap itself, the Engineering School’s outrage and counter-petition, the potential efficacy of the policy on accessibility, and harm to academic rigor.
This piece will expose some key issues embedded in this discussion. Firstly, we will bring down the unquestioned myth of accessibility which was the cause for this policy. Secondly, we will explain a wildly misleading claim concerning MIT’s unit cap. This assertion was the engine for Stanford’s proposed 100-unit cap and, up to this point, has been buried in the minutes of the Faculty Senate meetings. Finally, we will explain what the crusade for accessibility has done to Stanford and American universities, and what happens when the bubble of falling academic standards finally pops.
Accessibility is a Myth
In the aftermath of the decision to impose a 100-unit cap on all majors, many questioned how successful the plan would be in actually increasing accessibility to majors previously seen as exclusionary. But this is the wrong question. Let’s look for a second at a number we all know: Stanford’s acceptance rate is an almost comically low 3.6%. This is clearly a school that acknowledges large-scale differences in human capability to succeed at certain levels. Yet our administration refuses to acknowledge the obvious, that these differences in human capability exist even when we get to Stanford. The question is not what plan can best achieve accessibility, but rather why accessibility is even a stated goal.
The simple fact is that not all majors are accessible, because there are natural differences in human excellence that predispose some people over others to excel in any given field, whether it be music, science, languages, or athletics. I do not, nor does anyone else, have the ability to be excellent in every field. Let’s go further. Excellence is not accessible to everyone. If Stanford truly does intend to be the beacon of academic excellence and foster tomorrow’s leaders across disciplines, this fact must be accepted first. Rather than attempt to increase accessibility in a way that does not negatively impact rigor, the notion of accessibility must be rejected outright. While it is a favorable aspect of Stanford that one is not locked into a specific school or major when they are accepted, changing the major to fit the student is putting the cart before the horse.
There is one other aspect of the design team’s proposal worth noting. The committee thought that lowering the bar to complete the engineering majors would encourage enrollment in the humanities. It is true that there is a perceived chasm in difficulty and rigor between humanities majors and STEM majors at Stanford. To this end, I would go a step further than the team of engineering professors who took on the 100-unit cap. The humanities departments should have jumped on that train as well. It may very well be a bad thing that Stanford students view engineering fields as significantly less accessible than humanities fields writ large. There is, however, a solution. Make humanities less accessible. Raise the bar. In our coming age, where STEM majors will fall more and more out of fashion, Stanford should have the foresight and moral courage to increase standards across disciplines and ensure that all admitted students rise to the bar Stanford sets, correctly putting the horse back in front of the cart.
MIT is a Misleading Comparison
On page 8 of the Future of the Major Report, the committee starts to make comparisons between Stanford and other elite universities, grouping them into different categories based on their major structure, citing inconsistency with other universities as the “core rationale” behind the decision. MIT was given as the flagship example to justify a unit cap on majors. After the measure passed in May of 2020, MIT was invoked again as a driving engine behind the system in the Faculty Senate meeting on June 23rd. Professor Tom Kenny, one of the main spearheads of the motion and current Senior Associate Dean for Education and Student Affairs, cited the readiness of MIT students for PhD and graduate programs as evidence that “the cap itself is not the obstacle.”
In the June 23rd meeting, many professors from the engineering department sounded the alarm on the policy. Specifically, Professors Eric Shaqfeh (formerly at MIT) and Parviz Moin noted that MIT could not be used as a legitimate example because of their General Institute Requirements (GIR), a series of coursework that all MIT students must complete to graduate. It was an accurate and obvious point, but did not succeed in stymying or discrediting the 100-unit cap plan. What was never fully explained, however, was how far off this MIT analogy really was. Crunching the conversion numbers between the Stanford and MIT systems is particularly tedious. It is also worth noting that not all conversions are exact, since various MIT classes have slightly different content than their Stanford counterparts. This being said, the numbers we find exhibit some astonishing discrepancies.
At MIT, each credit accounts for 14 hours of work over the course of a 14-week semester (excluding exam period), amounting to about 1 hour of work a week, meaning that the best approximate conversion between Stanford and MIT is 1 to 3, respectively. For the sake of simplicity, from here on out, we will be converting all the MIT unit counts to the Stanford scale.
MIT does have a range for major requirements, which sits at 60-66 units. As pointed out already, MIT also has GIR, which includes math and science classes, many of which would be counted in the regular major requirement number at Stanford. This number is 6 classes amounting to 24 units, bringing the overall total to 84-90 units. Of course, the cap is the upper bound, so we’ll take the number 90 units. But 90 is less than 100, isn’t it? Herein lies a major flaw in the comparison with MIT. Each class at MIT is taken for 14 weeks rather than a Stanford quarter of 10 weeks (an additional month of coursework), so each unit at MIT should count for 1.4 times what it does at Stanford. So, what’s the real unit cap on majors at MIT? It is 90 x 1.4 = 126 units. This is far more than 100!
It is no wonder that Professor Eric Shaqfeh of Chemical Engineering balked at the proposed Stanford plan. Let’s take Chemical Engineering as a quick example. At MIT, the minimum number of units required to complete a Chemical Engineering major is 62, which becomes 62 + 24 = 86 when accounting for GIR. Scaled by 1.4 because of the week discrepancy, this is approximately 120 units. In 2015, the Stanford Engineering handbook put the minimum number of units for Chemical engineering at 113, which is less than 120, but not substantially so. Now, ten years later, the number is 95, over 20% less than MIT.
There are several arguments that people could make in response, perhaps that MIT has too many requirements or that Stanford places a higher value on interdisciplinary and wide-ranging study. These claims not only fail to justify a 20% difference; they even do more to explain why MIT’s unit cap as a justification for Stanford’s 100-unit policy makes absolutely no sense at all. MIT is certainly an interesting example, but one that does not provide clear conclusions.
The Bubble is Beginning to Pop
So how does the Stanford policy on unit caps relate to the report released by UCSD? The link is that years and years of admitting students based on fake equity standards result in failures like UCSD.
In the past 5 years, the number of incoming freshmen at UCSD who do not meet middle school math standards has increased thirtyfold, amounting to one-eighth of the class. The damage is not limited to math, as “a similarly large share of students must take additional writing courses to reach the level expected of high school graduates”. Paradoxically, the acceptance rate to UCSD has decreased by 12% in the last 5 years, from 40.4% to 28.4%, indicating that selectivity is going up. Only deep-seated and purposefully hidden rot could cause such numerical disparities.
The initial reaction to such numbers is that it must be the result of the COVID-19 stagnations in learning. Compelling, but ultimately irrelevant. UCSD is ranked in the top 30 of all colleges in the United States according to US News. Literally no one should enter their gates who is functionally illiterate and mathematically inferior to above-average 8th graders. And yet, the UCSD gates seem to be wide open.
In the report, UCSD sheds some light on why preparedness has fallen precipitously. In the years following COVID, UCSD started to disproportionately admit more students from under-resourced schools, more than its other UC counterparts. The report argues that it is not this fact that has impacted UCSD as much as the lack of standardized testing has affected their ability to find “reliable predictive information about mathematics preparation”.
Here, it is worth commending UCSD and its faculty for having the courage to publish this report. While UCSD is ahead of the curve in its fall from excellence, everyone else is not far behind. Berkeley became the last UC to create a precalculus class a year ago, and Stanford created the equivalent Math 18 in 2022. UCSD has been gracious enough to give a warning to the rest of the country on what failed accessibility policies can contribute to.
There are many unanswered questions on this front, and many solutions still to be developed. The UCSD catastrophe is the result of many factors, not limited to admissions, and including failing high schools. Nevertheless, The Review is committed to investigating these issues at all levels before they grow into what could be our generation’s greatest failure.
But what does this mean for Stanford? Professor Shaqfeh started his speech by saying that Stanford is “the best engineering school in the world.” This ought to be our standard, not just on West Campus but for every discipline we engage in. In an age where the University is seen to be on the decline, in Silicon Valley, which uniquely disregards the value of a college education, Stanford must be the city on a hill.
Practically, this means rejecting self-defeating ideology and re-evaluating academic standards across all disciplines. At Stanford and across the country, we must reinstate standards in departments and in admissions, and reassert the mission of research universities as engines of knowledge and discovery rather than engines of equity. The university is not morally neutral; it pursues the objective good of excellence, and never apologizes for it.
