Imagine a student named Maya. She wakes up at six in the morning, catches a bus, and walks into a high school where the books are old and the counselors are stretched thin. She works hard, takes every advanced math and science class her school has to offer, and still manages to score above the average SAT mark in her building. She has a story, a dream, and a work ethic. She wants to become an engineer. But when her application reaches a college admissions committee, someone quietly points out a problem: her transcript has no calculus. It isn’t that she avoided the class. Her school doesn’t offer it. And according to a new study from the University of Michigan, that single missing course is enough to make students like her far less likely to be recommended for admission to engineering programs—16.4 percentage points less likely, to be exact. This wasn’t because those students slacked off or chose the easiest classes. They reached the top of the curriculum they were given. Yet something about that gap in mathematics was still held against them. The lead researcher, BK Byun, captured the uncomfortable issue at the heart of the study: colleges love to say they use holistic admissions, which means they evaluate students in the context of their opportunities. They love to promise that a student won’t be punished for a class that was never available. But the study suggests that, in practice, the promise doesn’t always hold. It raises a hard question: is calculus a gatekeeper that quietly punishes students from underprivileged schools, or is it simply the unavoidable language of engineering? Maybe it’s both.
I have sat through dozens of college admissions presentations over the years, and the phrase “holistic admissions” is repeated like a comforting prayer. Admissions officers look at students and say, don’t worry, we read every application in context. We won’t penalize you for the opportunities you didn’t have. We care about your story, your persistence, your growth. And there is something genuinely good in that message. But engineering is not a major where mathematics is a minor detail. It is the foundation on which everything else sits. A student who arrives at college without calculus has not just missed one box on a checklist. She has never been tested on the kind of abstract, fast-moving reasoning that calculus demands. She may be brilliant. She may have outworked everyone around her. But her ability to do higher math is, at best, untested. Admitting her into an engineering program is therefore a bit of a gamble—for her, and for the institution that wants her to succeed. That doesn’t mean she cannot succeed. It means no one knows yet. The study describes this as a kind of bias in admissions, as though admissions officers are discriminating against someone for an arbitrary reason. But the absence of calculus is not arbitrary. It is hard evidence of a structural gap. Colleges are not being unfair when they notice that gap. They are being realistic about what engineering courses will demand. And if we are honest, the most unfair thing would be to let a student walk into a calculus-based physics course without any preparation, pretending that she is ready, when she was never given the chance to find out.
That doesn’t mean there are no solutions. Maya could take calculus at a community college over the summer. She could take a rigorous online course, one that ends with a real grade and a real evaluation. This is not always affordable or easy. But it is a path that gives her a chance to prove something to the admissions committee and, more importantly, to herself. It respects her potential without pretending that the missing math is irrelevant. Admissions officers should also make room for exceptions. They should look at a student who outperformed everyone around her and understand that her record shows enormous promise. But they should not be expected to treat that promise as if it were identical to the preparation of a student who had calculus, physics, and years of high-level math in a school where those classes were the norm. The same article that describes the Michigan study notes that the researcher hypothesized admissions officers might simply be “biased” toward applicants who took calculus. The word bias carries a heavy negative weight, but in this case it seems misplaced. It is not prejudice to notice that an engineering student needs calculus. It is judgment. If a student lacks the course, the answer is not to tell her the course doesn’t matter. It is to give her a realistic way to get that course into her transcript before she lands on campus.
The deepest irony here is that many of the same people who are outraged about this inequity are part of the movement that made it worse. School districts in California, including San Francisco, ended math tracking in the name of equity. They decided it was unfair to let some students take algebra in eighth grade, so they made it impossible for anyone to do so. That may have sounded progressive. But the result was predictable: if students cannot take algebra in eighth grade, they cannot take calculus in their senior year of high school. The door that was supposed to open was quietly locked. And the families with resources were not locked out. Wealthy parents moved to different districts, sent their children to private schools, or found after-school programs that still offered advanced math. The children who were supposed to be protected by the new policy were the ones who lost access. Instead of raising the floor for everyone, the policy lowered the ceiling for the students who needed it most. This is a pattern that repeats itself again and again in American education. Whenever we decide that a certain level of opportunity is not equally available, we often respond by making it unavailable to anyone, instead of fighting to make it available to all. We call that fairness. But it really is surrender. And then, years later, we blame college admissions for noticing that the opportunity is missing.
Something similar has happened inside the classroom, in the way mathematics is taught. Many schools have abandoned explicit instruction—clear, direct, step-by-step teaching—in favor of methods that ask students to discover mathematical concepts on their own. This method sounds empowering. In practice, it often means that students are left to figure out difficult material without anyone ever explaining it clearly. Parents who know math can step in. Wealthier families can hire tutors. But a student whose parents work long hours, or who never felt confident in math themselves, is left alone to “discover” what a more privileged child is simply told. This is the same mistake we made with reading, when schools stopped teaching phonics and asked children to guess words from pictures. The reading disaster eventually led to a renewed appreciation for the science of reading. But the math version of that disaster is still playing out. We abandoned the science of math. We told teachers to be facilitators rather than instructors. We told students that the process was more important than the answer. And then we were surprised when the gap between rich and poor students widened even further. The problem was never that some children cannot learn calculus. The problem is that we decided to stop teaching it to them. Then we told them the inability to learn was on them. That is not justice. That is neglect dressed up as progressive education.
And what do we do with the evidence? We ignore it. We attack standardized tests because they expose inequality, and so we remove them. We move to test-optional admissions and tell ourselves we are being more compassionate. But if we stop looking at the numbers, we still have to face the results eventually—except by the time we do, it is too late. At the University of California, almost one in five students in introductory math classes is now failing, withdrawing, or otherwise not making it through the course. That rate has nearly doubled in just five years. These are not unprepared students who had no business going to college. These are admitted students, accepted with encouragement, told by admissions offices that their hard work mattered. They arrive on campus with dreams and motivation. Then they hit a wall. That wall was not built by calculus. It was built by the years before calculus—by eliminated algebra courses, by romantic discovery methods, by policies that wanted children to feel better rather than know more. Holistic admissions, as currently practiced, can hide those failures. It can make colleges and universities feel good about their mission. But it cannot replace the actual support that students need. If we truly want to help underprivileged students get into college—and succeed once they are there—we need to do the harder work. We need to offer the same opportunities in every neighborhood. We need to teach math explicitly, with confidence and clarity, in every classroom. We need to restore accelerated pathways for students who are ready. And we need to be honest, in admissions and in life, about the difference between a prepared student and an unprepared one. The Michigan study is a reminder that the gatekeeper starts early. The calculus question is not something colleges can solve on their own. It is a challenge for all of us, and the time to face it is now.