Californians Shouldn’t Need a High School Diploma to Go to a Public University

To Make Up for the Pandemic-Era Student Achievement Gap, Our Higher Ed Systems Should Skip the Requirement

Why should you need a high school degree to go to university in California?

In 2020 and 2021, the state’s public schools ditched their students, shutting down K-12 campuses for over a year and providing irregular and ineffective online lessons. Since then, educational leaders have often failed to acknowledge, and done too little to compensate for, all the learning loss—which is why average California eighth graders now do math at a fifth-grade level.

And with public schools just trying to survive chronic absenteeism, teacher resignations, political controversy, and historic enrollment declines (270,000 …