Expanding Calculus Access

Liz Katz

At highly selective colleges–the target for many independent school families–the numbers of applications keep rising and admission rates continue to drop. I’d imagine those numbers are top of mind as tenth and eleventh graders finish their course selection process this spring.

With many colleges and universities maintaining their test-optional admissions, course selection and transcripts take on added weight. As a result, Calculus has become an unofficial prerequisite, offering assurance that students are taking the most challenging courses their school offers.

Unsurprisingly, enrollment in Calculus courses started to rise dramatically.  Calculus enrollment more than doubled from 7% in 1990 to 19% in 2013. (Paradoxically, enrollment in Calculus did drop to 16% in 2019). Data also demonstrates that Calculus enrollment is not equitably distributed; 6% of Black high school students took Calculus, compared to 18% of white students. In public schools where fewer than 25% of students are eligible for free lunch, 25% of students take Calculus; in schools where more than 75% of students are eligible for free lunch, only 9% of students do. 

Access to Calculus is not a reflection of students’ ability to complete higher-level math courses. Often, it’s a reflection of the middle school students attended. That’s because in order to take Calculus in the senior year, students need to have completed Algebra I before starting high school. That’s fairly standard in independent schools, but just 24% of public school students take Algebra I in eighth grade. 

As a result, independent high school math placement in ninth grade often aligns with whether or not a student attended an independent K-8, and because white students are dramatically over-represented in independent schools, white students are typically over-represented, first in ninth-grade Geometry, later in twelfth-grade Calculus, and, ultimately, in selective college admissions. 

Math achievement in high school shouldn’t be determined by the education a student has access to in middle school–and it doesn’t have to be. Imagine a ninth grade curriculum that covers the material of Algebra I, well-scaffolded by explicit instruction in executive functioning skills and growth mindsets, followed by a summer program that guides students through Geometry coursework. Those students return to school in the fall of tenth grade, ready for Algebra II, on track for Calculus and the college application process in their senior year.

We’re proud that our summer math courses are used by schools to help build equity in their academic programs. Frequently, schools subsidize or cover the cost of the course as part of their tuition assistance package. Since first offering the course, Geometry has consistently been one of our top-enrolled summer courses. 

Let’s go back to that enrollment data. It’s worth noting that these are pre-pandemic numbers, and 2019 is the last year that data was available for this study. We do, however, have access to the number of students who took the AP® Exams in Calculus AB and Calculus BC. (Of course, the number of students who take the AP Exam isn’t equal to the number of students who completed the course, but that data isn’t readily available.) Between 2019 and 2020, the number of students who took the tests dropped 10%. Between 2020 and 2021, it dropped another 5%. It’s not possible to tease out the reasons for these drops, but the pathway to Calculus seems to be narrowing–and that’s not good for equity or achievement. 

The College Board is trying to bridge the achievement gap with their new AP Precalculus course designed to expand the path to Calculus. The goal, says Trevor Packer, senior vice president, AP and Instruction, is to “prepare a much broader group of students to thrive in college math courses, regardless of where they start in high school math.” Any move to further equity and access is a good one. At the same time, AP Precalculus doesn’t question the assumption that Calculus should be the zenith of the high school math curriculum–it cements the assumption instead. For a great conversation about the high school math curriculum, check out this 2019 Freakonomics podcast episode featuring professor Jo Boaler and College Board CEO David Coleman.

Math educators don’t want Calculus to be the solitary endpoint for high school math. The Mathematical Association of America and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued a joint position statement in June 2022 that “a high school calculus course should not be the singular end goal of the PK–12 mathematics curriculum at the expense of providing a broad spectrum of mathematical preparation.” 

How might college admissions offices rethink their allegiance to Calculus? That’s a question math teachers, college counselors, and researchers are trying to answer. A 2021 report sponsored by Just Equations and NACAC,  A New Calculus for College Admissions:  How Policy, Practice, and Perceptions of High School Math Education Limit Equitable Access to College offers research and proposals to widen the pipeline to advanced mathematics, and to challenge college admissions officers’ assumptions about high school math.

Until college admissions offices shift their thinking about Calculus, independent schools are stuck with an intractable problem. Highly selective colleges demand that students take Calculus, but students’ ability to take Calculus in high school is inequitable and determined by factors outside their control. In addition, taking Calculus in high school doesn’t necessarily serve students as well as advanced topics in statistics, data science, or other branches of applied mathematics. Schools need to ask how they can expand equity and justice and provide students with the math knowledge they need to thrive in a rapidly changing world. We’re happy to be one of the answers.