Lowering the Bar, Passing the Buck
By the time new students arrive at Rutgers-New Brunswick, they have likely spent years in New Jersey public schools. And yet, too many of them still aren’t ready for college- level math, which costs them time and money and can make it harder to earn a degree and launch a career.
The burden of addressing those math gaps falls on the state’s higher education institutions, including Rutgers, the state’s flagship. Worse, by lowering the bar for what it takes to graduate high school, state policymakers have played a role in making those preparation gaps even wider. While this report focuses on the effects on Rutgers students and faculty, a more useful question for state policymakers is why so many students are arriving underprepared at the doors of the state’s public colleges and universities.
State leaders congratulate themselves on rising high school graduation rates, which reached a record high last year of 91.8%.
But this stat is obscuring the fact that New Jersey, like some other states, has diminished what it means to earn a diploma. Over the past decade, New Jersey has steadily expanded the ways students can satisfy their high school math requirement. On the 11th-grade New Jersey Graduation Proficiency Assessment (“NJGPA”), only 58.5% of students were deemed “graduation ready” in math in 2025.
The difference between these achievement levels —a graduation rate of nearly 92% versus a math proficiency rate under 60% — is due to the state’s introduction of alternative graduation pathways.
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