Maybe I'm massively out of touch but I'm pretty sure a good teacher could teach that stuff to almost anyone.

Like this stuff isn't particularly complicated, I'm not a very good teacher but I did teach some undergrad seminars during my PhD and I think even my worst students were capable of understanding functions, graphs and trig.

That's not the issue. College algebra courses are super compressed, they're basically trying to teach the whole of junior high + high school math in a single semester. That's barely teaching, and the natural outcome of such a cursorily taught course is to act as a 'weedout' course.

Yup. My observation (having not had to take College Algebra myself, but knowing people who did) is that it's a class to make sure people who fell off the math train back at operations on fractions or factoring or whatever, don't get any farther.

I was a tutor in business school on behalf of the MBA program. Basically, there was a small group of students who were... not prepared with respect to math. We're talking really simple algebra, maybe the simplest of differentiation (e.g. maxima of a simple quadratic function).

One of them told me one day "I don't understand graphs." I tried but it's impossible at that point to make up for an apparent total lack of at least high school level arithmetic/math.

I mean, what do you want them to do? Invest resources in splitting up material into multiple courses when they should have learned it before even coming to college? It's not their fault public schools suck.

State universities kind of do have this responsibility. My school is doing more or less this, restructuring some of the math sequences that have a high failure rate, like precalc/calc 1.

Also state universities are where most of the public school teachers and administrators trained, so they probably deserve a little of the blame for the state of public schools.

IMO the only stuff a student "should have learned" is stuff that they can't get onto the course without knowing. Allowing someone onto the course, for which "x" is a prerequisite, who doesn't know "x" is entirely the university's responsibility.

All public schools do not suck but especially urban schools can have a lot of problems and many of the students don't have a great home environment either,

You are in touch with your kind of people, the kind who graduate from university.

If you were doing a PhD you were at the kind of university that has a PhD programme. Probably it was one of the 200 or so US universities out of a thousand that are selective, rejecting more students than they accept. I doubt there was a single student in your seminar who wasn’t in the top 30% by academic aptitude of their age group.

> According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_State...

I would assume that class that is described as:

"4 hours a night 6 days of week and I got a C. Less the 25% made it to end. Don’t think many of remaining passed.

Got a lot out of it though."

Actually is abstract algebra and not highschool level. Nobody teaches remedial classes in such a way that only 25% make it to the end.