I can't speak to the general phenomenon, but I will say that students do not come to college with any mathematical preparation. The ones who learn mathematics l

I can't speak to the general phenomenon, but I will say that students do not come to college with any mathematical preparation. The ones who learn mathematics learn it here. It's actually worse than this, students have a much easier time learning to program, which they have mostly never done before, than to perform even the simplest identical reasoning in the context of mathematics. I am forced to come to the conclusion that school is so bad that it is harmful to education. This strikes me as something to consider before worrying about whether children are attending. This is, I am assured, the basic right wing agenda coming to fruition. Make (public) schools so bad that people start thinking of them as a waste of money, but the actual work that has gone into making them terrible has been bipartisan. Bad teachers need to be able to be fired, and schools need to compete for enrollment, rather than some secondary measure of performance.