The Evolution of the American High School Student (and What This Means for College Educators)

In my five decades as an educator and college administrator, I’ve visited my share of high schools, especially early on in my career when I was academic dean at a new art college in Savannah, Georgia. SCAD was small back then — we enrolled 71 students our very first fall term in 1979 — and everybody participated in recruiting, faculty, staff, everyone. I traveled to many high school art rooms in those days, classrooms replete with Fauvist abstracts and Pollock-esque dropcloths in every corner, speaking with eager and hopeful students who constituted the very vanguard of Gen X.

Some 40 years later, as president of the same institution, I’m still visiting high schools. Why? I am curious. Today’s high school students belong to Generation Z, those born between 1995 and 2010. The oldest members of Generation Z have already been in college for four years and will be graduating this spring, while the youngest will be graduating around the year 2031. What do we know about these young people? How have secondary schools and high school students changed in recent generations?

Difference No. 1 — Exactly what you think it is

The first thing you notice when you visit today’s American high schools is the ubiquity of screens. Everybody has a phone, and while many schools ban usage during class, most students use their phones during breaks and lunch, which means that high school hallways look exactly like most American sidewalks: everybody looking down, only occasionally glancing up to check for open manholes and wild bears. According to the Washington Post, today’s teens are on personal electronic devices and the internet an hour and a half more every day than just a decade ago.

The good news: As a group, our incoming students are masters of technology, nimble operators who can effectively articulate their ideas through digital means. Yesterday’s time-wasting tech is almost always tomorrow’s game-changing tech.

What this means for educators: Individual attention for students is more important than ever. Faculty members should schedule intentional, personal meetings outside of class with each student; these conversations — about their progress in the course, career aspirations, or personal challenges — help remind our students that being “present” is about far more than being in class. Technology isn’t going away, and neither should personal attention to each student.

Difference No. 2 — The death of ennui

In earlier generations, if pop culture is any indication, the defining quality of many a high school student’s existence was boredom. Daydreaming in class, blowing bubbles in study hall, getting up to no good in the parking lot after school, these pastimes are largely extinct in most schools. Generation Z keeps itself very busy. During the academic year, students have abundant options — theater workshops, dance class, fashion club, swimming, soccer, you name it. Many young people belong to travel teams in athletics, spending most weekends competing in tournaments at the highest level. During summers, they are building their résumés for college applications, engaged in impactful volunteer work, and experiencing shorter summer breaks. Today’s youth are just as busy as their parents.

The good news: Busy young people, like their busy adult counterparts, know how to get things done. And most of them appear to enjoy being busy, according to one study.

What this means for us: Our incoming students can handle demanding assignments. When creating large projects, educators should design checkpoints that require students to complete incremental tasks. Otherwise, these busy young people may make the rookie mistake of waiting until the weekend before the deadline to begin (because they’re busy being the well-rounded young people we know them to be).

Difference No. 3 — An endless buffet

Today’s high school students live in a Cambrian explosion of choice, with options in electives, clubs, research tools, and even the cafeteria. What might seem like a whirling vortex of paralysis-inducing options is in fact empowering to today’s students, who must apply themselves to determine their tastes. As a result, today’s students express much more self-knowledge than their predecessors. More than ever, today’s high school students arrive at college knowing what they love.

The good news: Members of Generation Z possess a sense of ownership in their lives. They have high expectations of their choices and are less resistant to being intellectually challenged in subjects and disciplines they have had a role in choosing.

What this means for us: College educators should integrate choice, when feasible, into assignments. In my experience, students who are given options (about essay topic, project focus, presentation style, etc.), especially when they must help generate the options individually or collaboratively, are often more willing to take on demanding assignments with a cheerful and earnest attitude. Despite the partnership inherent in teaching and learning, educators must always clarify in writing how assignments achieve the required student outcomes.

Difference No. 4 — Everyone’s special(ized)

As a corollary of the exponential growth of student choice, a dizzying array of specializations are afforded to members of Generation Z. This is true in subject, scope, and sport. In the past, honors classes and Western languages prevailed; today, students can choose AP, dual/joint college enrollment. Mandarin and ASL are as common now as Spanish. In the past, drama club was limited to the classics, while today, students engage in film criticism and cinema studies. (One high school I visited recently had a large auditorium, as well as a small black box theater for experimental productions.) For earlier generations, athletics were limited to football, football, and football. Today, skeet shooting, table tennis, fencing, lacrosse, and yoga are all the rage.

The good news: Generation Z, as a cohort, has experienced as many academic specializations and different extracurricular opportunities as most of us had by our fourth year of college, if not later.

What this means for us: Educators should endeavor to dazzle these students — they’ve seen much more than we saw when we were their age. Their ability to relate to and synthesize foreign concepts is highly developed. Have them read more complex articles and essays, and introduce a specialized discipline into your course design: they can handle it. At the same time, written and oral communication never go out of style. Ask students to practice these perennial disciplines by taking on advanced subjects and new frontiers of discourse. They will rise to the challenge.

What never changes

The current wave of first-year students landing in U.S. colleges and universities is something to celebrate. Our teaching should strive to galvanize these savvy, industrious, thoughtful, and engaged students. The Age of Z is upon us, and this is a very good thing indeed.

Last fall, during a visit to Mountain Brook High School near Birmingham, Alabama, as I walked the halls and considered how vastly different today’s high school students are from those a generation or two ago, I poked my head into a bustling room in the media center to find several students busily engaged around a couple of laptops. “What are they working on?” I whispered to my host. Probably creating a new app or designing a VR web comic, I thought to myself.

“Oh, they’re working on the yearbook,” my host explained.

Some things, I am happy to say, never change.

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Paula Wallace is the president and founder of the Savannah College of Art and Design, with degree-granting locations in Savannah, Atlanta, Hong Kong, and online, as well as a permanent study-abroad location in Lacoste, France. She is the creator of many programs for advanced high school students and educators, including Summer Seminars, Rising Star, and Educator Forum. She is also the author of several books, most recently The Bee and the Acorn, a memoir.