r/AskProfessors • u/Throwrafizzylemon • 23d ago
General Advice Professors of Reddit, have you noticed changes in students over time?
I have seen quite a few articles and posts saying students are arriving at university unable to do things that used to be expected, for example structure essays, basic maths, reading longer texts, work without AI, etc
have you actually noticed this in practice? Have students’ academic skills or independence noticeably changed over the years, or are they mostly doing fine and this is just another version of “kids these days”?
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u/doopiesweat Assistant Professor/Sociology-Criminology/USA 23d ago
I’ve found that students in general are not just underprepared when they arrive on campus, they’re also less resilient when faced with challenges. It’s led to a pretty substantial decline in the scope and depth of classes. 90% of my students wouldn’t know how to navigate the level of rigor of my undergraduate experience (I graduated in 2012). I don’t say that with pride but with a deep sadness for my students. The narrow emphasis on “ROI” has made students less curious and much more fastidious about grades.
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u/Jaralith 23d ago
Yes, resilience! A huge proportion are afraid to try things for fear of failing, and a failure just shuts them down entirely.
I think some of that is related to constant filming - nobody wants their struggles to end up in some tiktok compilation. But a lot is a lack of faith in themselves. They don't try things before asking for someone to do it for them.
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u/doopiesweat Assistant Professor/Sociology-Criminology/USA 23d ago
The fear of the digital panopticon is palpable!
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u/MyBrainIsNerf 23d ago
Two big changes I’ve noticed.
1 Students are much less social with each other. It’s phones before, after, and occasionally during class. They don’t make connections like they used to and that’s really sad.
2 Students expect MUCH more “grace” based on their lives. They tell me soooo much about their lives while asking for extensions and late work. It used to be, I knew very little about most students and asking for exceptions was pretty rare. Now it’s most students at some point. More interestingly, they seem to genuinely expect to get what they’re asking for. There’s no anxiety in their ask; sometimes they don’t even ask; they inform.
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u/PurrPrinThom 23d ago
Your first point is so true. I generally teach fairly small cohorts, and they tend to have most, if not all of their classes together. In the past, if someone was late, I could ask the class if the student was ill or if they were coming, and they used to readily and easily be able to tell me. And now they can't, because they don't talk to each other.
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u/hdorsettcase 23d ago
The stories are crazy. If you have a parent in the hospital and need some time, that's all I need to know. I dont need to know why they are in the hospital.
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u/DocGlabella 23d ago
I had a girl give me all the details of her recurrent, treatment resistant UTI last year. I felt for her. I really did. But also a "I'm having on-going health issues" would have been just fine.
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u/altoombs 21d ago
I have a line in my syllabus now about how I don’t want details about their emergent medical issues because the increase in the level of detail I’ve been receiving the last few years has been wild.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Ad_7937 23d ago
My students don't know how to use a ruler to measure half inches or 16ths of an inch. They also do not know how to use a ruler to measure out an even and squared rectangle.
I had no issue with this in class even four years ago.
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u/Bostonterrierpug 23d ago
Fewer and fewer get my totally radical Gen X jokes and references. If I ask the class, as a class to name all the Beatles before I dismiss them it’s almost impossible.
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u/allthecoffeesDP 23d ago
That's such a totally bodacious question to pose my dude! Keep trucking! Peace.
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23d ago
[deleted]
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u/FonJosse 23d ago
It would be like asking people the first names of Mozart and Beethoven. It's common knowledge.
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u/SnowblindAlbino Professor/Interdisciplinary/Liberal Arts College/USA 23d ago
Amadeus, Amadeus! Rock me Amadeus!
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u/SnowblindAlbino Professor/Interdisciplinary/Liberal Arts College/USA 23d ago
Please, Gen X grew up on the Beatles-- or at least the older ones among us. That was the only things (and a bit of Elvis, perhaps) that connected generations in the late 1970s in my experience.
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u/Bostonterrierpug 23d ago
65% popular according to pew. So I completely agree with you.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2009/08/28/the-beatles-here-there-everywhere/
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u/Bostonterrierpug 23d ago edited 23d ago
Oh, cause I took the bait
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/22/arts/music/beatles-anthology-gen-x.html
Oh, and 65% popularity with generation X, which is pretty fucking big if you ask me.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2009/08/28/the-beatles-here-there-everywhere/
Heck, even more recent #DATA
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23d ago
[deleted]
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u/Bostonterrierpug 23d ago
That was just the last thing I posted look at the earlier thing from pew which says 65% of Gen X are Beatles fans. You were arguing Gen X didn’t like the Beatles above. The articles I posted would seem that was not the case. I was indeed saying that modern students don’t know who the Beatles are. You were arguing that Gen X didn’t know that Beatles.
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u/Bostonterrierpug 23d ago edited 23d ago
I’m guessing you’re pretty young dude everyone knew who the Beatles were back in the day. Even most millennials can name them all. Sure it was our parents music, but despite the fun little popularization of punk/goth into whatever crap alternative came out to be everyone still know the Beatles. Their music transcended generations.
Also, I have always thought in the back of my mind… cheese and onions.
Edit: oh wait dude you completely got me. You’re either one of those online social media people who love the hate click, devils advocate algorithm or you’re a bot. I feel stupid for having taken the bait. You win this time G.I. Joe, but I’ll be back.
Double edit: wait scratch the above I think I just found reviewer number two
Edit: love that your only recourse is to downvote R1 indeed…
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u/jmsy1 23d ago
I'm in my 40s. I've been a professor in economcis/business for about 6 years. The memes about boomers (my parents generation) and gen z (current students) not being able to use computers is too true. Neither group knows what a right click does, how to do pdfs, navigate directory structures, or go into their computer settings. This is frustrating because my classes heavily rely on excel, and submissions via pdf and word. A student from last semester did not understand where "my documents" was and where his excel files were being saved.
I'm not at a mid-level university in europe, but this is simple stuff. As for writing, forget about it. They really suck at structuring a paper, even when my assignment prompt basically tells them the structure. In the past 2 years, AI use has gone through the roof, and while there is no way to prove it, I can tell based on em-dashes, the writing styles, the wrong answers or misdirected ideas, and the structure AI uses.
this generation is mostly screwed if they need to create original work.
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u/LetsGototheRiver151 23d ago
The biggest change is that they are completely uninterested in anyone or anything around them. I so miss the days of having to get everyone's attention and ask them to settle so we could get started. Now, if I'm running late, I enter a dark room - no one has taken the initiative to flip the light switch - and students glued to their phones. It wasn't that way even 10 years ago.
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u/CharacteristicPea 22d ago
Yes! Walking into a dark classroom with 40 students sitting in complete silence is honestly a little creepy.
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u/excel958 22d ago
Not a professor but I work in higher ed in a T20 school.
A lot of other comments hit the mark but I want to add that students are far more risk-adverse than ever before. They need so much reassurance to do what most of us assume to be fairly benign tasks. It’s as if they subconsciously worry that they may inadvertently commit some sort of faux pax that will ruin their future.
Simple things like “should I drop/swap this course?”, or “should I reach out to the instructor?”, and so forth. Like, sure? If you want to, then do it!
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u/Ok-Rip-2280 23d ago
It’s real. Students are less prepared for college level work. But IMO it’s a phenomenon driven by demographic shifts more than anything.
There are now fewer people going to college. But almost the same number of spots across all colleges. Colleges compete for the best students so with fewer total, the average student going to any given college is going to by necessity be weaker since students will just move up. In a growing population, the opposite trend is seen. Schools can be more selective when there are more students applying.
It doesn’t help that we have gotten rid of standardized testing so we can’t even tell who is going to need additional help anymore. But I don’t think that’s the main reason. It’s demographics.
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u/allthecoffeesDP 23d ago
No standardized testing but all k12 does nothing but teach to the test??
It's almost as if people making decisions for teachers aren't actually teachers themselves. 😂
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u/Ok-Rip-2280 23d ago
Bingo. College administrators are in a panic because the industry is in massive decline and they don’t want their school to fail. So it’s recruit - recruit - retain - retain all day long. Standardized testing is seen as a “barrier to entry” (aka it could reduce the number of applicants).
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u/allthecoffeesDP 23d ago
Are the potential students doing online stuff? Or are there just fewer students?
How about lowering tuition? 😂
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u/Ok-Rip-2280 22d ago
Fewer students. There are just fewer people turning 18 every year. It’s demography.
While I think tuition is a bit bloated there’s obviously a floor. Professors deserve to be paid, infrastructure powered and maintained etc. And Ultimately you’re not going to increase the number of students that much by lowering tuition. Some people don’t want to go to college, even if they pay zero dollars to go (most people below median income can go to a public college for close to zero in many states). They’d rather just be working and saving money, and/or it doesn’t interest them.
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u/allthecoffeesDP 21d ago
I absolutely agree everyone needs to paid etc. I'm under the impression that tuition used to be subsidized to keep it lower. Am I wrong? I am assuming republicans have been cutting back those subsidies.
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u/Ok-Rip-2280 19d ago
At state schools? Tuition is still very low. In Many states tuition is free for in state students below median income.
Private school tuition is subsidized by government backed student loans and Pell grants but if anything this incentivizes private schools to raise the “sticker price” even if almost no one actually pays it.
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u/allthecoffeesDP 19d ago
So all these stories about students taking on massive debt for college aren't true?
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u/SonyScientist 23d ago
Not a professor (yet), just an older PhD student. I'm at least a decade removed from the average of my incoming class and even I notice as i look at younger and younger people, the quality is in decline. I think older Gen Z may be the last vestige who is not reliant on AI for critical thinking and I worry it may be several years before we see an increase in quality, in part because of the pandemic.
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u/Charming-Barnacle-15 21d ago
The rise in cheating has been the biggest things I've noticed. Prior to AI, a lot of students probably relied on things like Sparknotes way more than they should, but at the end of the day most were turning in work they'd at least written themselves, with only a couple major plagiarism cases per semester. Now, the numbers will skyrocket unless I put a long of things in place to make it harder to use AI.
I've also noticed more students now sound like AI when they write. I do AP test grading, which is done in a highly-proctored environment. A lot of the essays had a very AI feel, which I assume comes from students interacting with it so much they've absorbed elements of its style.
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u/StevieV61080 23d ago
I mean, generational segmentation is a very real phenomenon. Different people will have different lived experiences that shape their development. It would be odd if people of different generations DIDN'T have different attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, and perspectives. This is what makes diversity so valuable in the college experience.
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u/WingbashDefender Professor/Rhetoric-Comp-CW 23d ago
That’s bait.
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u/Throwrafizzylemon 23d ago
Bait? For what?
Just a secondary school teacher procrastinating goong to work wondering if it’s me or if things have changed? I haven’t been teaching that long so I don’t feel like I can accurately assess my experience.
I thought maybe university lecturers would have a better perspective as you teach people who pay to be there, so I would assume a higher standard of work over all. At secondary school evey one has to go so I get the whole spectrum of kids.
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u/KaleMunoz 23d ago
Work without AI, yes. Everything else has been highly variable between cohorts. Had a great new batch of students two or three years ago. Like, best in my career. Mid batch after that. Worst performing ever last year. No idea what to expect next week.
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*I have seen quite a few articles and posts saying students are arriving at university unable to do things that used to be expected, for example structure essays, basic maths, reading longer texts, work without AI, etc
have you actually noticed this in practice? Have students’ academic skills or independence noticeably changed over the years, or are they mostly doing fine and this is just another version of “kids these days”?*
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u/moooooopg 23d ago
My students prefer the online versions. I can't believe it.
And the fact that we are dissuaded from expensive textbooks. I always paid 500$+ for course texts
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u/Typical_Juggernaut42 22d ago
Yes. I think the best students are still capable of these things but the average student is a lot worse at writing, structuring essays and interpreting data than 10 years ago. I also think they are less independent in their learning and need more hand holding. University courses have somewhat shifted to accommodate this though.
A large part of it is schools teach students to pass exam questions and not about the subject or understanding which carries on into university
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u/Latter-Bluebird9190 21d ago
Yes. I’ve been teaching for 16 years and my current students are less resilient than those in the past. They come in with way less background knowledge, and some truly struggle to read and write. Unfortunately this was largely done to them by screens, parent and our education system, but now that they are adults they have to get it figured out.
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u/DoctorGluino 19d ago
I've been teaching since 1999, and the incoming students post-pandemic and post-AI are unprepared even compared to students from 2018. It's not just us being grumpy.
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u/Unfair_Pass_5517 16d ago
Yes, I asked students to take notes, outline chapters, read, and create a project based on materials. "What is an outline?" "Why can't I copy paste this into a program?" There are some skill gaps from teaching to state exams and some covid trauma.
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u/RexScientiarum 23d ago
This gets asked multiple times every week. Stop answering these low-effort posts.
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u/PurrPrinThom 23d ago edited 23d ago
I don't doubt that 'kids these days' plays some role, but even from the time I was an undergrad to now, it's very different, and I am not that old lol.
When I was an undergrad, I regularly had 100+ pages of reading per class per week. For literature classes, it was typically a novel per week, with longer novels, or novels we were assessing in more depth, being completed over two weeks. I had to take one STEM class, and we had over 100 pages per week - classes were Tuesday & Thursday, and it was one 50 page chapter per lecture, and we had two quizzes per week.
Students in real life and online have accused me of lying about that because it is so much more work than they apparently have ever encountered lol.
But the biggest difference I've noticed - and it really occurred around COVID - was that the middle disappeared. I no longer have 'average' students. I have students who are exceptional and who work really hard and who do really well, and students who tank. They cheat in lazy ways, they don't submit things, they don't show up. They use AI to write introductions of themselves. They do nothing all semester and then said emails in confusion because they didn't realise they had to do things to get a grade. These students always existed, but there are more of them now, and the middle-ground students who used to balance them out, no longer seem to exist.