I don't understand why there is so much effort put onto cramming math into high school. I took calculus in high school and then repeated it in college. There is plenty of time in college (especially if some of the less useful elective requirements were taken away) to catch up on your math requirements, so whether you are ready for Algebra in 8th grade or not should have no barring on whether you are able to pursue a STEM major in college, let alone be successful in your career.
I think we lane people out of STEM way too early, which is what I believe some of these curriculum changes are trying to redress.
Math is one of the pure foundations for liberal arts so getting it done early is better. We should be focusing on getting high schools teaching it so well that colleges don't feel the need to rerun it not saying you can do it later. High school grads should be able to pass the AP Calc and AP Stats exams to the level colleges feel they can totally ditch the 100 level courses for those subjects.
If you don't have students repeating basic math (and chemistry) in college, they can do deeper on an elective track involving a STEM because because their STEM credit hours aren't spent getting a rerun of Calc I.
Yes, because mastering Calc wasn’t what I was capable of in high school.
It would have been a huge shame if I was slightly worse at math, didn’t even take Calc and thus wasn’t accepted into a CS program upon graduation.
So much stress and consternation is spent on saving one calculus corse in college (and it’s used as gate keeping to get into an elite college stem program).
I think we lane people out of STEM way too early, which is what I believe some of these curriculum changes are trying to redress.