Douglas Belkin

There's two buckets it falls into.

At UC San Diego, the percentage of kids who have to take remedial classes, which goes back all the way to elementary school and middle school math in some cases.

has risen from about 0.5% of the freshman class to about 9%.

And then when the kids get into the STEM classes, the level of preparation is really disparate.

So you end up with professors who are trying to bridge these learning gaps in class, which ends up slowing down the progress they can make and the amount of the curriculum they can cover.

This is the $64,000 question across the education spectrum right now from elementary school through college.

If kids aren't plugged in, engaged, and focused, then they're not going to learn as much, and they're just not.

And so the gaps are significant.

There's a lot of experimentation right now going on about how best to teach and reach these kids at different levels.

You know, in the K-12 system, there was a big push on individualized tutoring.

And the hope was that if you sat a student next to a teacher or a mentor or a tutor, they could pull them up.

So that's been helping.

There's been a lot of experimentation of getting rid of phones in classrooms.

There's been a lot of experimentation of using blue books for college exams.

and even oral examinations so that kids can't cheat on these examinations.

We just saw Princeton University update their honor code so that students will now be monitored by professors in classrooms because there was concern about cheating there.

So it's sort of all over the map, and there's not been a good silver bullet.

One of the more interesting issues we're seeing is schools just incorporating AI wholesale.

And, you know, the results aren't in yet.