I am 63 years old and went to the NYC Public School System from K-12. That was back when the NYC Public Schools were considered among the best in the country(BU, before unions).
I took Algebra I in the ninth grade, Algebra II in the eleventh grade, Geometry in the tenth grade and Calculus in the twelfth grade. There was nothing extraordinary about that for hundreds of my fellow student. It was generally considered what you needed to take for an Academic H.S. Diploma which would prepare you to go to college.
Today it is readily possible to get into college with the most basic math skills that prepare you to balance a check book and little else.
It is the dumbing down of our culture which started in the late nineteen sixties)and continues to this very day), which is hampering our ability to find qualified people to take over when my generation is out of the work force.
I work for an engineering company in NJ. The technical work force has no Caucasian Americans under the age of 30 and no African Americans at all. The engineers and computer science folks are mostly middle age white men and women as well as all ages of east and west Asians.
This is the contribution that the Unionizes Teachers of Public Schools has made to out culture as well as the politicians. That is why the get 4-5% raises every year.
I am a mechanical engineer, and I haven't seen the lack of Caucasian Americans under 30 for our company. However, the number of AAs in mechanical engineering is quite low.