As Pepperdine University literature professor Jessica Hooten Wilson told Fortune in a recent interview, “it’s not even an inability to critically think. “I feel like I am tap dancing and having to read things aloud because there’s no way that anyone read it the night before,” Wilson admitted. Timothy O’Malley, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, told Fortune that students showing up unprepared for class isn’t necessarily new, but the lowered expectations are. “Today, if you assign that amount of reading, they often don’t know what to do,” he explained to Fortune, adding that most Gen Z students are skating by on AI summaries. Short of major structural changes to the US education system, it’s likely Gen Z won’t be the last generation to experience worse literacy rates than the one that came before.