Number of UW math degrees plummeting in age of AI
As math proficiency continues to decline in Wisconsin schools, the Legislature is considering a plan to improve numeracy, or the ability to work with numbers in daily life.
Lawmakers filed Assembly Bill 615 last month after the release of more disappointing reports about the math skills of elementary and high school students in the state and around the county.
The reports come at a time when considerably fewer students nationally and at Universities of Wisconsin are graduating with mathematics degrees — but when mathematics departments are stressing the discipline’s importance in the age of artificial intelligence.
Wisconsin is attempting to follow the lead of at least seven other states — Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Virginia and West Virginia — that have passed laws requiring schools to test for math comprehension and to offer remedial help, including tutoring, to raise overall test scores.
Alabama, once at the very bottom of math skills scoring, is now the only state in the nation whose scores have surpassed their levels prior to the pandemic. Most of the credit had gone to the Alabama Numeracy Act, passed in 2022.
“A good understanding of math is essential to a prosperous life and career, and that will become increasingly true in a future of high-skilled labor,” state Sen. Rob Hutton, R-Brookfield, co-author of the bill, said at the time it was filed last month.
The Badger Institute contacted Hutton and state Rep. Karen Hurd, R-Withee, for comment but did not get a response before publication of this story.
At a Nov. 6 hearing before the Assembly Committee on Education, Hurd outlined a program to test students in kindergarten through eighth grade three times a year. Students at risk of below their grade level would be required to follow a structured remedial plan, with tutoring available.
Districts with more than half their math students in the fourth grade scoring as less than proficient would be required to create a math achievement plan based on a Department of Public Instruction model.
The authors acknowledge the numeracy bill and its individualized attention to students is modeled after the Right to Read Act, passed with bipartisan support in 2023.
“AB 615 would ensure that all schools are identifying the students who are falling behind in math and implementing a plan to get them moving in the right direction,” Hurd told the committee.
Lawmakers are responding to bad news nationally and in-state. In the U.S. Department of Education’s most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress report, data gathered from more than 19,000 12th-grade students found math scores in decline since 2019 and at their lowest point in 20 years.
The report estimated that based on these scores, only a third of high school graduates are prepared for entry level college math.
The full NAEP report, including state breakdowns, does not spare Wisconsin. Fourth-grade math proficiency overall has dropped from 45 percent in 2019 to 42 percent in 2024. Eighth-grade proficiency during that same time dropped from 41 percent to 37 percent, according to NAEP.
Last year, only 5 percent of black fourth-grade students scored at or above proficient at math, compared to 51 percent of their white counterparts. For eighth-grade students, 7 percent of black students and 45 percent of white students scored at or above math proficiency, according to the report.
Just 12 percent of Milwaukee Public School fourth-graders were proficient at math in 2024, compared to 33 percent in other major American urban districts, the report said.
The numbers drop in eighth grade, with just 8 percent of MPS students and 23 percent of other urban district students reaching proficiency, the report says.
Never a particularly popular major — although there was an increase in interest with the rise of computer science in the 1980s — the number of students earning mathematics and statistics degrees is down across the UW system and across the country.
The number of math and statistics degrees earned in this school year throughout the state system is 384, down 31 percent from its modern high of 557 in the school year ending in 2020. This year’s degrees represent 1.4 percent of the 26,650 degrees of every kind conferred across the system, according to system data.
Coincidentally, the University of Wisconsin-Madison led the nation in the number of undergraduate mathematics degrees conferred, 396, in 2023, a year when universities nationally gave out 27,179 mathematics degrees, a more than 6 percent decline from the year before, according to Data USA’s mathematics webpage.
It isn’t clear whether AI will change the trend in mathematics as an academic pursuit, but schools are adjusting. UW-Eau Claire and UW-Stout have AI majors.
DPI leaders do not support the numeracy testing bill. Superintendent Jill Underly in a fiscal note attached to the bill, said she believed such testing would require additional funding, although she didn’t include a dollar figure. “We do not believe the answer to improving math outcomes lies in creating state laws in a construct that is like 2023 Wisconsin Act 20 (Reading Act),” Underly said in a letter to the committee. “DPI stands behind the work taking place to implement 2023 Act 20 but does not believe another state mandate will help improve outcomes.”
Mark Lisheron is the Managing Editor of the Badger Institute.
Any use or reproduction of Badger Institute articles or photographs requires prior written permission. To request permission to post articles on a website or print copies for distribution, contact Badger Institute Marketing Director Matt Erdman at matt@badgerinstitute.org.
