I'm surprised that this is considered news, because it's been an observable issue for 15 years or more. As I understand it, when O-Levels were replaced by GCSEs

I'm surprised that this is considered news, because it's been an observable issue for 15 years or more. As I understand it, when O-Levels were replaced by GCSEs the maths syllabus dropped some of the more challenging areas like calculus, leaving all the study of these areas to the A-Levels. As a result the standard of maths understanding for the university intake generally dropped. Universities made a number of changes to deal with this: they introduced more maths-light degrees (for example, combining some computing content with business management, finance and languages content), some courses increased the amount of maths tuition in the first year, and I believe that some even extended the course to four years to give students time to 'get up to speed'. That said, I wouldn't class this as 'dumbing down'. They're reacting to a change in the tuition that happens prior to university entry that they have little control over. No one is saying that they're dropping the standard of the teaching that the universities are actually delivering, so the ability of a physics or computer science graduate today should be broadly similar to that from 10 or 20 years ago. What seems to be changing is the amount of work that the universities need to do to get students from a lower ability at entrance to the same level at graduation. That, and a migration by the students towards courses which are lighter in maths. Caveat: it's 15 years since I worked at a university, so I have no inside knowledge of what's going on these days.