There is nothing cute about innumeracy

I recently discovered that Big State U, located in the town where I live, offers a major program specifically to handle people who signed up for engineering or CS but who are "bad at math." I use scare quotes because, except in rare circumstances, "bad at math" means "utterly failed by the education system." Instead of expending financial and organizational resources to remediate their innumeracy, the university permits them to pay a shocking amount of money and waste four years of their lives learning no useful skills.

I had interviewed a recent graduate of the program, who was basically unable to do math beyond the middle-school level, for a programming job. I was perplexed by the lack of skills and we did not extend an offer. I didn't put two and two together (so to speak) until I was chatting with a laborer who was helping move furniture around a few weekends ago. It turns out he was currently enrolled in this program, and he explained that he'd switched over from Real Engineering because he couldn't handle the math. And he wasn't the only one -- it became clear that the department offering this program has expansionist tendencies and markets it as an alternative to engineering. I didn't know how to tell him his future was being stolen, or if he would have believed me if I had.

I'm still a bit furious about this. It's one thing to allow a student to enroll in English Literature. Everybody knows that doesn't pay, but at least you're well-read. The program I'm talking about leaves no discernable mark on the student -- no attainment in literature, the arts, music, or philosophy, but no scientific or technical skills either. All you get is an expensive piece of paper and a few decades of indentured servitude as you pay down your useless education. I wonder about the people running this program. How do they sleep at night?

tl&dr. Innumeracy is the incapability to handle numbers. People should minimally be able to do basic math. However many companies never test for this.

Paywalled, is there a workaround?