What happens when even college students can’t do math anymore?

Article note: I consider myself pretty bad at arithmetic, but I had some shocks on the embedded systems midterm I gave a few weeks ago, where otherwise capable students had a hard time with basic arithmetic, and especially the idea that the joy of SI notation is that you can work the base and the exponent separately. Especially weird position to be in because I'm not generally a supporter of forcing kids to learn mental math tricks to perform like a circus pony, if you need precise answers to complicated expressions, use a computer. However, being able to do basic "is this reasonable" checks on orders of magnitude and eyeball ratios and the like is super valuable.