PROF. GARRETT: Harvard’s math class problem shows why merit still matters

A former tenured professor at Bakersfield College, Matthew Garrett is the founder of Renegade Institute for Liberty, an organization dedicated to promoting intellectual diversity. He launched the California Curriculum Center shortly after retiring from academia to offer nonpartisan curricula for independent educators and charter schools. 

Harvard University, once the gold standard of American education, is now offering a full-year, five-days-a-week remedial math class for incoming freshmen. The course—called “Math MA”—covers basic “algebra, geometry, and quantitative reasoning.” In plain terms, Harvard is reteaching middle school math to students it handpicked as the nation’s brightest.

The university blames COVID-19 pandemic-era learning loss. But it’s hard to believe the most selective school in the country couldn’t find 1,900 students with solid math skills. COVID disrupted classrooms, yes—but Harvard had roughly 54,000 applicants. If this is the cream of the crop, something is clearly wrong in the admissions process.

According to the College Board, which administers the SAT, a math score in the low 500s suggests college readiness. Harvard historically admitted students scoring in the 680s to 800—reflecting mastery of advanced math. The fact that it now must remediate basic skills signals a willful abandonment of foundational standards.

This isn’t about COVID-era setbacks. It’s about ideology.

In recent years, Harvard and other elite institutions dropped standardized testing requirements. These admission requirements exposed uncomfortable realities—especially that Asian American students consistently outperformed every other group, while others consistently struggled. Rather than confront these disparities or invest in real solutions, universities tried to engineer equal outcomes.

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They leaned on “anti-racists” activists like Ibram X. Kendi, who smeared standardized tests as racist tools and called for their abolition. In his view, any disparity in outcome proved systemic racism—and the only solution was present-day discrimination in the other direction.

This simplistic view ignored differences in effort, preparation, and personal choice. Yet it gave cover to administrators eager to skirt civil rights laws while pursuing racial quotas. The solution? Eliminate objective metrics that reveal performance gaps and replace them with vague “wholistic” criteria like “lived experience.”

Under the cover of pandemic disruption and antiracist rhetoric, schools rewrote admissions policies to reward identity over ability. This ideological experiment peaked just as the Supreme Court, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), ruled that racial preferences in admissions—even covert ones—violate the Constitution.

Still, many universities continued, aided by a Biden-era Office for Civil Rights that looked the other way. Thankfully, the tide may be turning. The current administration has signaled renewed commitment to enforcing civil rights for all Americans.

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Racial preference policies don’t lift students up—they set them up for failure. At Duke University, efforts to diversify STEM fields led to the admission of underprepared black students. When they struggled, the students changed their majors to less rigorous degrees. Graduation rates may have improved on paper, but the cost was tragic: the loss of potential engineers, doctors, and scientists who were never given a fair academic match—only a political one.

This is what happens when ideology replaces merit. Rigor erodes. Degrees lose value. Employers stop trusting diplomas. And students—especially those who need real opportunity—pay the price.

Some schools are waking up. Harvard plans to reinstate SAT and ACT requirements. MIT, CalTech, Dartmouth College, Yale University, Georgetown University, and Purdue University have already done so. They’ve admitted what they won’t say aloud: the anti-merit experiment failed.

But others—Columbia University, Princeton University, the University of Chicago, and the entire University of California system—still cling to the failed ideology that degrades both students and institutions. As top schools admit underprepared students, less selective schools reach even lower, mismatching students across the entire educational system and setting them up for failure. Ironically, these universities are creating the very systemic discrimination the “anti-racists” claim to combat.

If we want excellent schools, prepared students, and a country that rewards hard work, we must return to first principles: merit matters. When we reward effort, ability, and knowledge—not just identity—we set students up for success and ensure that opportunity is earned, not assigned.

Meritocracy isn’t just fair. It’s the key to a stronger nation and a brighter future.