Anyone else have growing concerns about the state of education?

I want to preface this by saying that this is not a post to slander or shame people in college with a poor education. I reject ideologies that just blame all societal problems on people being 'lazy'. I'm trying to express a growing concern of mine - and one that I believe to be common too - given both anecdotal experience and data I've seen.

I'm an Idaho student - so that's likely been a major contributor - but I feel like I'll often speak with people and notice a serious gap in education level that's so common and extreme that it honestly disturbs me. I think about it more than I wish I did. Its something I noticed in High School, but I feel like the anxiety surrounding it has grown now that we're properly adults and the reality of everything sets in. You'll peer review a paper, or hear about a test average and it'll be unnervingly poor. When my midterm for an entry level Physics course was returned the average turned out to be about 60%, something that I suppose the professor lamented was 10% worse than the average for most semesters he taught. I consistently find that a lot of the Freshman I bump into are well below standard for Math as well, I think I'm the only Freshman I know in a College level Math course right now. Same goes for writing as well. I haven't peer reviewed the most works this semester, but particularly in High School it was really eerie. I'd be an upperclassmen in high school and be given papers for peer review that read like middle schooler wrote them. I've also heard of a lot of drop outs when we're barely past the midterms, which does not bode well in my mind. I just feel like that I'll often talk to people my age and I gather the impression that many of them In general I just feel like I'm witnessing an erroneous amount of my peers fall behind and it pains me in a way I can't even articulate.

The optimist wants me to believe that this was just a general issue and its been like this for some time, and that its good these people are in college right now as they'll finally get the education they need. The pessimist in me knows this is a lie though. Given recent election results, a lot of data I see about conspiracy theory thinking that I see, and about all data I'll see about educational standards I worry that this isn't a localized and temporary phenomena but rather a growing trend.

Am I just in over my head? I could be easily overreacting, Physics courses are notoriously hard after all. Maybe dropouts are just a lot more common than I realized. I also feel like I'm uniquely privileged in having a strong idea of what I want to do in the future, so maybe my anxiety that a lot of students do not have direction in their life stems from my own much more privileged relative perspective. Regardless, it worries me.

I don't think I'm alone in this anxiety either though as I've seen a decent stack of posts online expressing the same concern after people would peer review a colleagues work or have a similar experience where they realized that their peers were performing at a substandard level. I fear that a mixture of social media lowering people's attention spans, the awful erosion of our public education, and generally just a dismissive attitude towards ones own education that I saw too often in high school, has lead to an abysmal output in education that can and will have a serious impact for decades to come. Both on society as a whole, but also on the lives of the individuals whose educations have been ruined.

If I'm being frank this is half a genuine question about how people feel about the current state of our generations education for College aged students, but also half a vent post. Out of all the issues we're putting up with, the self-evident education crisis Gen Z is undergoing is the only one that truly overwhelms me. When it comes to all social issues I can remain steadfast in the belief that positive change can and will arrive, but this is the exception. Every-time I’m reminded of how low education standards have dropped I just want to run away and live in the woods for the rest of my life. I think part of it is just how much I personally value intelligence. I firmly believe that knowledge, curiosity, and passion are the things that make life worth living. So the fact that so many of my colleagues may be lacking these traits depresses me. I feel like they’re missing out. Furthermore - in the least pretentious way possible - it reminds me a lot of what I believe many of the great physicists and mathematicians I idolize saw. I worry that the decline in education is reminiscent of the same decline Einstein, Fermi, Hilbert, etc. had to bear witness to. It doesn’t help that their story doesn’t have a particularly happy ending either. It eventually got to a point that many of them had to just get on a train and run away. I grow anxious that history is repeating itself, rhyming at least. It’s very defeating to see a societal issue, look back in history, and see that all that the greatest minds in history could do was run and hide. If they couldn’t stop it, what the fuck am I supposed to do?

I remain optimistic that things won't get as bad as what Einstein and Fermi had to run away from, but its depressing to imagine that things have gotten to a point that its not off the table, and I feel this failure of our education is the major culprit.

Am I just overthinking things, or are other people having concerns about Gen Z College students demonstrating a lack of education and a lack of passion for most intellectual endeavors?