Recently, one of my professors shared an article from Scriptorium Philosophia called “The Average College Student Today.” It described students as if we were falling apart - simply becoming unmotivated, unreadable, and unreachable. It is like watching someone describe your hometown when they have never lived there. They see the map, but you see the streets.

So here is my response as a Gen Z student who is actually living this version of studenthood. I am not writing to fight. I am writing to explain what our reality feels like from the inside.

The truth is simple. We are being judged through a lens built for another era. When Gen X faculty talk about the classroom, they remember a world where life moved much slower, news arrived once a day, and childhood had long, quiet mornings. My childhood was shaped by disruption. I was a fifteen-year-old sophomore in high school when the pandemic shut down schools and shifted classes online, making me lose almost two full years of math and communication skills. I returned to my senior year of high school and was expected to pick up where I left off. What I carried instead was a hollow space in my learning and the grief of a world that felt permanently shaken. That gap follows me to this day, and I know many who feel the same way.

Gen X grew up during years that felt more predictable while Gen Z’s emotional world also developed under constant crisis. My generation grew up watching wars, economic recessions, climate disasters, political chaos, and a pandemic unfolding on our phones. We learned to fear the future before we learned algebra. My nervous system is always on alert as a result of receiving breaking news’ alerts and CDC employer panels news at the same speed. When you grow up inside that kind of noise, it becomes difficult to ever fully rest.

Technology shaped our brains differently as well. Gen X had boredom and quiet afternoons. We had screens and comparison culture from the moment we could read. It is strange to be asked to read like someone who never had to fight a billion-dollar attention social media economy purposely designed to distract. We are not inattentive because we do not care. We are exhausted because our tools were not designed for learning. Instead, they were designed to never let us go.

The academic pressure is also heavier for us. Gen X students did not need perfect GPAs, an internship at nineteen, and a portfolio that looks like a designer with a full-time job. However, these days admissions are harder, opportunities are fewer, every application asks for more proof, being average is no longer safe. We live with the fear that one A- can collapse our entire future. Perfection culture is not ambition, it is survival.

And behind all of this is the weight of money. According to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, modern students work around 20-30 hours a week on average. Expenses rise faster than wages, making our generation one of the most indebted in history. Every time I sit down to study, I am also thinking about master’s scholarships, fees, and whether I can even afford to exist in the future I am trying to build. Research on scarcity, such as the work of Sendhil Mullainathan, shows that financial stress directly reduces cognitive bandwidth. When your brain is busy trying to make ends meet, it becomes physically harder to focus, plan, or recall. It is not laziness, it is the cost of survival.

Unemployment furthers this issue. We apply to hundreds of jobs and receive silence. It is hard to feel hopeful when the world tells you that effort does not always lead to stability. This quiet despair drains motivation in ways that are hard to explain to people who entered adulthood under different economic circumstances.

One thing that often gets ignored is how afraid some students are of faculty. It is not a personal fear, it is structural. Professors hold grades, opportunities, and recommendations so one short email feels like a high-stakes performance.

So when people describe the “average student” as careless or illiterate, they miss the context. They miss the emotional and economic reality that shapes our ability to learn.

Gen Z is not weaker than previous generations, we are simply carrying more. We grew up through a pandemic that interrupted our minds and in a world that asked us to be perfect, visible, productive, and calm while everything around us was unstable. We are not falling apart. We are trying to build a future on ground that keeps moving under us.

This is not an apology for my generation but a reminder that the world changed. Students are different now because the conditions we grew up in are different too. The average student today is not less capable than the average student 30 years ago, rather more overloaded. And if we want to learn to be honest and human, that truth has to be part of the conversation.

I am grateful to the faculty who ask, listen, and try to understand. Even when the dialogue feels uncomfortable, it pushes us toward something better. I am writing this because I believe that understanding our reality is the first step toward restoring trust and rebuilding classrooms that respond to the world we actually live in.

We are not a broken generation. We are a generation trying very hard to survive a world that has not been gentle with us.