Reports from Notre Dame, Pepperdine, Columbia University, and the University of Virginia have shown that Gen Z students are walking evidence of the failure in the education system that leaves them struggling to read and ill-prepared to succeed at the college level.
In 2024, Aleysha Ortiz, a top-ranking Hartford Public School student in Connecticut, sued the Hartford Board of Education alleging that staff bullying and harassment led to her inability to learn how to read or write.
According to her lawyer, Anthony Spinella, Ortiz is seeking $3 million in damages. The lawsuit alleges negligence and negligent infliction of emotional distress. In August 2025, a Connecticut Supreme Court Justice called for the dismissal of the case.
In Campus Reform, Jessica Hooten Wilson, a Pepperdine University professor, was quoted as saying, "If students cannot read well, it is our fault. We do not do students any favors by lowering our standards. Instead, we must be committed to walking beside students as they overcome greater hurdles to achieve what many adults were once educated to do – read great books."
Reasons attributed to the illiteracy issue are decreased SAT and ACT standards, lax K-12 schools not educating students properly, and increased use of artificial intelligence. Once these students are accepted into colleges, the responsibility then falls on the schools to offer tutoring, mentoring, and possibly hiring more staff and faculty to get students to where they can handle a college workload.
The ACT test is curriculum-based, meaning its content is designed to mirror what students learn in high school classrooms: English, math, reading, and an optional science and writing portions. Each year, ACT produces new versions of the test that specify question types, topic distribution, and difficulty level, largely to preserve test security and prevent cheating.
Before any question appears on a scored test, it's field-tested on a sample of students in an unscored setting so ACT can calibrate the difficulty level. The organization is also deliberately conservative about making changes to the test from year to year, choosing to make small, incremental adjustments over major overhauls. Large shifts could disrupt the ability to compare scores across years.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, more colleges have moved to test-optional admissions policies. This has lessened the pool of students who take the ACT, making national trend analysis harder to interpret. At the same time, a growing number of states, 23 currently, administer the ACT to all students regardless of college plans, giving researchers cleaner, more complete trend data at the state level. Some states show score declines and others show improvement.
Meanwhile, several Ivy League and other selective colleges have recently begun reinstating standardized testing requirements after years of test-optional policies.
In a study published by Elon University, college faculty agree that:
- 63% said their schools' graduates in spring 2025 were not very or not at all prepared to use GenAI in the world of work, compared with 37% who felt the graduates were very or somewhat prepared.
- GenAI's impact will be to increase students' overreliance on these artificial intelligence tools, including 75% who said the tools will have a lot of impact.
- 48% said their students' research has gotten worse because of GenAI, compared with 20% who said they believe it has gotten better.
As these numbers make clear the responsibility can't fall on colleges alone. Solving Gen Z's readiness crisis will require K-12 systems, testing organizations, and universities to work in tandem and rethink how students are taught, tested, and supported long before they ever set foot on campus.
