UCSD Admissions Fiasco Like Subprime Mortgage Crash

UC Berkeley star prof Jelani Nelson draws insightful analogy between current U. of California admissions policies and 2008 NINJA mortgages.

Dr. Nelson and Miss Nelson

Jelani Nelson is the chairman of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at UC Berkeley. He is half Ethiopian, half African-American, and grew up in the Virgin Islands.

He’s best known for kicking back publicly against the trend in California toward less rigorous standards of math education and admission in the name of DEI.

Here’s an insightful tweet from him about the UC San Diego admissions scandal/fiasco:

Jelani Nelson

@minilek

This UCSD math proficiency scandal reminds me of the great financial crisis in 2008. There was an assumption then, that bundled mortgages are nearly risk-free investments. This led to banks being incentivized to underwrite more mortgages, so they started handing out “NINJA” loans (No Income, No Job / Assets). This radical shift in the distribution of who got loans caused the initial assumption to break.

It’s similar here: there’s a base assumption that a UC diploma leads to better salaries, so the more we give to lower-income folks, we lift more young people out of poverty and that’s a good thing. But if you start handing these diplomas out to larger numbers of students who can’t do elementary school math, employers will notice and the base assumption will break.

8:12 AM · Nov 24, 2025

Right.

And the analogy can go even further.

Paywall here.