The prospects for California’s high school grads are not good as they face a shrinking job market and a correspondingly high youth unemployment rate. In Latin America, they are known as the “Nini’s” – out of school and out of work. According to a November 2025 LA Times article, a shocking 500,000 Californians age 16-24 are neither working or enrolled in college.
This is a recipe for a disaster that is already here. California’s public school system is feeding a triple headed hydra of crime, underemployment, unemployment, and educational underachievement with pablum in the form of inflated grades that camouflage a failing system that graduates students who can neither write or perform high school level math.
Some of those with high GPA’s are entering our elite universities unprepared for the academic rigors ahead and some of the less fortunate are headed for prison.
The “Idiocracy”
In a ranking of University of California campus admission rates, UCSD with an acceptance rate of 27 percent ranks third behind UCLA at 9 percent and UC Berkeley at 13 percent. Ranked globally in terms of overall quality, Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSD rank 5th, 13th and 21st respectively. A truly impressive achievement.
Despite that, the University of California San Diego took a brave step this month. On November 2, the university issued a report from its working group on admissions that lays bare the issue of increasingly unqualified students entering one of California’s most prestigious universities – an issue that is likely being repeated throughout higher education in California. The results are disturbing.
When assessed for math placement, 665 or 8.5 percent of new freshmen in the 2025 class were required to enroll in remedial junior-high level mathematics. Only 859 students or 11 percent, were ready for college level pre-calculus. In terms of analytical writing ability, from 2020-2025 between 15-19 percent of students were required to enroll in remedial writing courses to correct what they should have mastered in high school. And there is significant overlap in underprepared math and writing students.
News outlets around the country are echoing the report. The Atlantic called it, “A Recipe for idiocracy”. Nationally, as writer Rose Horowitch points out, the United States has lost 50 years of academic achievement putting us on par with the low achievement scores of the 1970s. While the UCSD report focuses on the post Covid-19 pandemic academic cohort of students, Horowitch points out that the decline in college ready grads began ten years before that.
Underemployment and Equity
Much of the change in college admissions standards, namely the removal of SAT or ACT scores for UC and CSU admissions, was in the name of equity. The consequence is inflated GPA’s and a lack of an independent measure of achievement that masks a level of under-preparedness that has caused many under-prepared students to leave STEM related majors. These students then switch to degrees that offer them both the lowest academic challenge and consequently, the lowest chances of employment and financial success.
Students with strong math and science backgrounds and who persevere and are successful in STEM related degrees have the highest rates of employment and the lowest rates of underemployment. In a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, engineering and computer science majors were underemployed at a rate of 16.5 percent while liberal arts majors were over 55 percent underemployed.
If they were employed at all.
Lying to ourselves
In 2007, PRI’s Lance Izumi raised the alarm about the issue of student performance in California’s “high performing” public schools when he wrote in his book Not as Good as You Think that:
Among such schools, 528 had 40 percent or more of their students fail to perform at proficiency in at least one grade level on the English or math CST in 2008. Of these 528 schools, more than eight out of 10 were in zip codes with median home prices of $300,000 (2007 prices) or higher. Amongst lower performing school the results are far worse.
The real school to prison pipeline
Progressive pundits complain of a school to prison pipeline that originates with the presence of School Resource Officers or SRO’s criminalizing student behavioral issues. Yet, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the average prison inmate shares something in common with those 665 UCSD students – they both have junior high school level math and English skills and both struggle with that in their respective educational environments. What separates them is the presence or lack of what are known as “protective factors”.
Factors such as two parent households; positive mentors; high educational aspirations; involvement in organized out of school activities, church attendance; and enrollment in schools that meet their educational as well as social and emotional needs.
California’s increasing levels of juvenile crime
From 2021 to 2024, violent crime arrests for juveniles increased from 3,981 to 6,739 – an increase of 69 percent. Even more dire is the increase in the number of homicides, which have risen 82 percent from 2019-2024. The number of juvenile homicides at the end of 2024 now stands at 124. Taken alone, that might seem low but it’s an increase that hasn’t been seen in decades.
17 years since Lance Izumi’s expose’ here we are. Rising crime, lower educational achievement, and rising unemployment. The Orange County Register editorial board recently concluded, “It’s a crime against California’s future to allow the government education system to fail this spectacularly.”
All of this makes one wonder how Sacramento’s progressive supermajority defines success.
