I have noticed a phenomenon where there are very many videos on social media where this generation of students are implied to be dumb, coddled to, and lazy. For instance, "many US students can't read at a 7th grade level" or "Students are using AI to write everything". Yet, the college application process nowadays seems to imply the exact opposite. Let me tell you a story, a long time ago my father got a full ride scholarship to BYU a local private university just because he was Top of the class with straight A's and a 34 on the ACT. Yet nowadays it seems almost impossible to get a full ride let alone to a top University. Universities now make it so hard to even get into. Like so many universities reject students who would be way qualified in the 20th century. For instance, at many top tier institutions straight A's, 30+ ACT, all honors, take lots of AP or DE or IB and get good scores on them, joining a lot of Extracurriculars are just seen as baseline. If we are truly the dumbest generation wouldn't they lower the bar to accommodate. We seem to be in a superposition where we are dumber than previous generations yet we are expected to do better than Ever before and hence 'Schrödinger's student'. These two seem to contradict each other, which is true? submitted by /u/ErekwithaD1 [link] [comments]