SUNY forced every student in New York to sit through mandatory Diversity Equity and Inclusion classes.
Now the same university system just launched an emergency intervention for freshmen it never saw coming.
The subject freshmen never learned has nothing to do with the one SUNY made mandatory.
A Quarter of SUNY Freshmen Failed Math and the System Called It a Record
One out of every four freshmen entering SUNY this year could not pass introductory math.
Twenty two percent failed freshman English on top of that.
SUNY's fix was not better high school preparation, it was assigning freshmen a personal tutor and stretching class time to catch them up after the fact.
Freshmen picked for the program at SUNY Albany face a full hour of writing help and an hour and a half of math and science tutoring, every week, this semester.
Hudson Valley Community College is shrinking class sizes and tacking extra instructional time on top, hoping smaller rooms and longer hours can undo years of decline.
Last fall the school restructured its introductory writing course entirely, capping enrollment at 15 students per section and putting instructors on the hook for two extra hours a week watching over student writing outside of class.
This is not a one campus problem, and SUNY knows it.
Dean JoAnne Malatesta said the goal is simply getting kids into the tutoring center and through a professor's office door before they fail out completely.
That is not innovation, that is triage.
SUNY has recruited 375 student tutors to lead weekly group study sessions in math and science, hoping peer pressure succeeds where high school did not.
SUNY Says DEI Is in Its DNA While Freshmen Can't Pass English
This collapse did not happen in a vacuum, and it did not happen overnight.
Back in 1996, California's own Legislative Analyst's Office found 43 percent of Cal State freshmen needed remedial English and 53 percent needed remedial math, and the CSU Trustees set a goal of getting 90 percent of freshmen college ready by 2007.
New York is now living that same nightmare on a bigger scale, and the national numbers show it was never going to fix itself.
The most recent Nation's Report Card found 12th grade math and reading scores at record lows, with nearly half of seniors scoring below the basic level in math.
Congressman Tim Walberg called the collapse a threat to America's workforce and national security, and Senator Bill Cassidy said the K through 12 system is failing children outright.
Meanwhile, SUNY leadership has spent its energy on an entirely different set of priorities.
In his annual State of the University address, Chancellor John King told the crowd, "At SUNY, DEI is not only one of our pillars, it's in our DNA."
Every SUNY student, at every one of its 64 campuses, has been required since 2023 to complete a general education course built around Diversity Equity Inclusion and Social Justice.
Nobody at SUNY made passing basic math a graduation requirement with that same urgency.
Now the bill for that decision has arrived, and it landed on freshmen who cannot solve for x.
The Priorities Are Right There in the Numbers
What actually gets me about this story is that SUNY had years to see this coming and chose diversity training over division and multiplication.
A university system with 1.3 million students and a $750,000 a year chancellor somehow missed that a quarter of its incoming class could not pass ninth grade math.
They didn't miss it, they just had other priorities, and those priorities got funded first.
If you're a parent paying SUNY tuition right now, you paid for a system that guaranteed your kid a lecture on social justice before it guaranteed they could write a coherent paragraph.
And if you're a New York taxpayer, you're now footing a second bill, remedial tutoring, to fix what the first bill, mandatory DEI coursework, never touched.
SUNY had every chance to catch this early, and instead it only reacted after the failure rate hit a record and made headlines.
New York families deserve a university system that teaches freshmen to read and calculate before it teaches them anything else.
That is not leadership, that is a system finally being forced to grade its own homework.
Sources:
- Mike LaChance, "State University of New York System Implements Mandatory Tutoring Program Because 'Record Number' of First Year Students Are Failing Math and Writing," The Gateway Pundit, July 21, 2026.
- "SUNY institutes mandatory tutoring, extra class time due to 'record' number of first-years failing math, writing," The College Fix, July 19, 2026.
- "2025 State of the University Address," State University of New York, May 21, 2025.
- Marc Tamasco, "'Nation's Report Card' Shows Alarming Decline in Science, Math and Reading Scores," Fox News, September 9, 2025.
- "US Test Scores Hit Damning New Lows," New York Post, September 2025.
- "CSU Early Start," Legislative Analyst's Office, January 14, 2014.
