I disagree; I think the tl;dr is a combination of (1) Math is hard AND (2) Teaching methods and student support optional are optimized for a minor subset of the

I disagree; I think the tl;dr is a combination of (1) Math is hard AND (2) Teaching methods and student support optional are optimized for a minor subset of the student population Point 1 is fixed; for most people, math is hard, and that's that. Regarding the second point, though, I imagine that there is a certain aspect of social engineering that could take place that would increase retention, without changing the curriculum at all.