Congratulations to the nearly 200 Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) high school graduates who have been named National Merit Semifinalists and will now compete for millions of dollars in scholarships to be awarded next spring.

These students deserve applause. But the bigger issue is: Why has the number of Fairfax students being named semifinalists dropped so sharply? The 191 for the class of 2025 is a drop from the 264 for the class of 2024.

The decline was most notable at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology, where the number of National Merit Semifinalists fell from 165 to 81.

Critics of the school’s recently changed admissions policy were quick to strike, suggesting that the cause may be that student admissions are based on factors not solely related to academic performance.

And that’s certainly possible. But that would only explain TJ’s numbers; the assumption is that students who were unable to attend the school due to the revised, woke admissions policy would have done almost as well at their neighboring schools, so FCPS had about the same number of National Merit Semifinalists overall, just distributed differently among the schools.

But that was not the case and the question of why is a mystery.

The National Merit Scholarship Corp.’s decision on semifinalists is made on a state-by-state basis, so Fairfax’s decline appears to be due to students from other states scoring higher on admissions tests.

Whatever the reason, this year-over-year decline is staggering. It should prompt a discussion about what Fairfax County Public Schools is doing right and what it is not doing right when it comes to maintaining a culture of academic rigor that challenges all students from top to bottom.

The ball is now in the school system’s court. We will see what, if anything, is made of it.