On August 31st, 2025, I will finish six years of service as Chair of the Department of Mathematics at UTSA. I reflect on this chapter guided by the principle that mathematics is everywhere, therefore mathematics should be for everyone.

Mathematics is the alphabet with which the vocabulary of all sciences is built. It is no surprise that departments of mathematics tend to be among the largest at US universities by number of students and credit hours served and therefore they have a very large contribution to student success. At UTSA, we serve approximately 12,000 seats per year.

Since 2019, UTSA has engaged in a process of continuous improvement of course coordination and curricular alignment. Course coordinators, elected by their peers, have a course release every semester they coordinate courses. There is an officially designated meta-coordinator and a Vertical Aligner of the Curriculum; these two roles facilitate the exchange of information across courses. Figure 1 illustrates the impact of course coordination, showing a nine-percentage-point reduction in DFW rates after implementation. This is a dramatic change, considering the number of seats served.

The University of Texas at San Antonio

UTSA is a research-intensive (R1) minority-serving (77%) and Hispanic-serving (58%) institution, with a large representation of first-generation students (44%). The incoming class of students admitted in fall 2024 was 7,120, with an acceptance rate of 88%, making it an inclusive institution. Texas residents account for 97% of new students; Bexar County, home to San Antonio, accounts for 49% of students.

However, the graduation rate is only 55%. One must ask the question: What happens to those 45% students who do not graduate? If the average lifetime earning of a person with some college education is $1.9 million vs. $2.8 million for a college graduate, the current graduation rate at UTSA will result in the removal of $2.9 billion from the regional economy potential in terms of lifetime earnings from the class of students admitted in 2024 alone… at a single institution. This does not consider the financial burden of student loans for uncompleted degrees. College attrition, with an overrepresentation of minoritized students across the US, is a multi-trillion dollar gap in wealth generation every decade. The problem is not only the wealth and tax base that is not generated, but also the human tragedy of perhaps binding people and their descendants to poverty for life.

The UTSA Math Study

This post is informed by the “UTSA Math Study” (UMS), a unique effort among U.S. universities conducted at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) since 2019. The study analyzed the influence of mathematics courses on academic success across all majors from 2012 to 2019. The dataset includes demographics and academic records for approximately 86,000 students, 2,000 instructors, and 5.5 million credit hours, analyzed using an open-source data pipeline to characterize every participant and classroom. The reproducible report generated by this pipeline comprises 10 volumes (one for each college at UTSA), totaling approximately 15,000 pages. While the results remain unpublished, they have been presented at numerous national and international forums.

The UMS has guided five years of operational refinement, concluding in the spring of 2025. Key outcomes include: (i) a 961-edge graph representing all lessons in the mathematics curriculum, each linked to a set of student learning outcomes (SLOs), (ii) open educational resources developed for every lesson in the curriculum, (iii) detailed performance data for individual students at the problem level for core STEM courses between 2022 and 2025, and (iv) a structured system for course coordination and curriculum alignment across all service courses.

Among STEM students, nearly all must take at least Calculus I. It is no surprise that 95% of the 12,000 seats served per year by the Department of Mathematics at UTSA are services courses.

The national statistic is similar; according to the latest available data from the Conference Board of Mathematical Sciences (CBMS) survey, approximately 2.21 million students took courses in mathematics departments in 2015 of which 2.01 million (93%) were enrolled in Calculus II or lower.

At UTSA, on average, 24% of students change majors. Figure 1 shows where students start on the left (donors) and the destination majors they switch to (acceptors) the major destinations for students who change majors. The left-bottom blue ribbon corresponds to University College, which distributes undeclared majors throughout the entire university, as expected. But the next major is Biology, which exhibits several pronounced acceptors: Kinesiology, Psychology, Sociology, and Philosophy and Classics (through a program called ‘Medical Humanities,’ which promised a path to medical school without quantitative tracks… it failed to deliver the promise). These students who normally identify themselves as “pre-med” during their first classes, abandon the health sciences track and pursue other avenues that are intrinsically meritorious but often fail to reach their passion and greatest contribution potential.

A Change that Matters

One of the best predictors of success across domains is numeracy coupled with confidence. Our society pays a tragic human cost when students drop out of college and never finish their degrees, or end up in different destination majors that do not match their passion and greatest contribution potential. In many cases, mathematics is the greatest obstacle. We have a clear moral imperative: To have the face of success match the face of the nation. This cannot be done without equitable access to mathematics.