Many of us exited high school with the joyous knowledge that we would likely never have to take a math class again. No matter how good you were at math back in the day, most math beyond the basics just isn’t that useful — and so, you find your mind replacing knowledge of “sine, cosine, tangent” with “that one Steven Seagal movie where he does a seven minute speech about the environment.”

Still, most of us would like to believe that we have *some* of that math knowledge kicking around somewhere in our brains. If you do, you’re becoming a rarity, as the California university system recently admitted that no one can do math anymore.

According to Newsweek, an internal UC San Diego report found that the percentage of incoming students testing below Algebra 1 — a level usually reached by the end of eighth grade — has tripled over the last five years.

This isn’t, like, “1% to 3%.” This is “6% tested below Algebra 1 in 2020, and now it’s almost 20%” levels of bad. Seriously — 1 in 5 incoming students can’t do eighth grade level math. Consequently, Math 2, a course that was designed for less than 1% of the incoming college class, has seen a 900% growth in popularity.

The course itself has also changed; while it used to cover high school topics like Algebra I and II, it now focuses “entirely on elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects (grades 1-8),” with “advanced” mathematics — a.k.a. The stuff you’re supposed to learn in 7th and 8th grade — being handled by another class.

One could look at this data and despair, or one could simply come to the conclusion that young people have realized that the average person does not need to learn advanced mathematics. Maybe trigonometry and calculus classes will simply go the way of shorthand education — a relic of a bygone era promoting a skill that just isn’t necessary in everyday life. Instead, universities can focus on teaching students the things that matter — like how to post on the internet.