August 26, 2025, Washington, D.C. — Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation today released the 2025 Voices of Gen Z study, an annual survey designed to better understand Gen Z’s unique perspectives, which reveal ambitions and challenges that are unique among this generation.

The findings of this year’s survey reveal that life evaluation among Gen Z has fallen to its lowest level in three years. Just 45% are considered to be thriving, indicating they rate their current lives positively and anticipate they will continue to rate their lives positively in five years.

The trend is fueled entirely by a decline among Gen Z adults. Only 39% are thriving, a five-point drop from 2024. The drop is driven particularly by adult Gen Z women: 37% are thriving in 2025 compared with 46% in 2024.

Meanwhile, more than half of Gen Z middle and high school students (56%) are thriving, similar to previous years.

The study also finds that several demographic factors continue to predict distinctly higher or lower rates of thriving:

• Black Gen Zers are more likely to be thriving than those of other racial and ethnic groups.
  
• Gen Zers who frequently attend religious services are more likely to be thriving than those who are less devout or agnostic.
  
• LGBTQ adults are significantly less likely to be thriving than their peers.

Despite this decline in well-being, Gen Z’s optimism for the future remains high. Over three-quarters of all Gen Zers (77%) agree or strongly agree they have a great future ahead of them, unchanged from 2024. Similar to the well-being trend, Gen Z adults are 11 points less likely than Gen Z students to agree they have a great future ahead of them.

Gen Zers’ self-reported preparedness for the future increased for the second consecutive year: 56% of Gen Z agree they feel prepared for the future, compared with 49% in 2024 and 44% in 2023. Unlike optimism, Gen Zers’ confidence in their readiness for the future increased across both students and adults and remains similar across these cohorts.

Classroom Engagement Soaring

Classroom engagement among Gen Z middle school and high school students is at an all-time high, according to the survey. Every element of engagement measured in 2025 reached record levels, with the largest gains since 2023 in the percentage of students who say:

• School gives them the opportunity to do what they do best (up from 40% to 50%).
  
• They have a teacher who makes them excited about the future (up from 70% to 78%).

In fact, most students consistently report that when they are engaged in school, it is because their teachers make the coursework exciting, interesting and easy to understand. However, half of students or fewer say that most of their teachers seem excited about what they are teaching (50%), make those topics interesting (42%) or connect their coursework to the real world (37%).

Students who report having a highly engaging experience at school — such as feeling like their schoolwork challenges them, is interesting and gives them opportunities to do what they do best — are significantly more likely to feel optimistic about and prepared for their future, understand their purpose and be thriving in their lives overall.

Historically, engagement has decreased as students approach graduation, with engagement among high school students lagging that of middle school students. It is notable, then, that increased engagement in 2025 is primarily due to high school students reporting significant improvements in their experience. Compared with 2023, every measure of engagement increased by 6 to 14 percentage points among high school students. Over the same period, middle school students have reported changes in engagement ranging from a two-point decrease to a six-point increase. Following these shifts, high schoolers are now at least as likely as middle schoolers, if not more so, to agree they are having each of the eight engaging experiences measured.

"These results show the promise of this generation. More students feel ready for the future, and engagement in classrooms is rising. Now we must ensure every young person has access to the kinds of meaningful learning experiences that unlock opportunity for a lifetime," said Romy Drucker, Education Program director with the Walton Family Foundation.

Despite the improvements in classroom engagement in this year’s survey, there are still significant percentages of students who do not agree that school gives them the opportunity to do what they do best (50%), challenges them in a good way (42%) or taught them anything interesting in the prior week (34%).

Further, students who do not plan to go to college after graduation are less likely to agree they have experienced each of the eight engaging classroom elements than their college-bound peers.

Methodology

Results are based on a Gallup Panel™ web survey conducted May 16-27, 2025, with a sample of 3,793 13- to 28-year-olds living in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The Gallup Panel is a probability-based panel of U.S. adults who are randomly selected using address-based sampling methodology. Gallup also recruits using random‑digit-dial phone interviews that cover landline and cellphones.

Within the overall sample, 1,746 13- to 18-year-old children were reached through adult members of the Gallup Panel who indicated they had at least one child 18 or younger living in their household. The remaining 2,047 18- to 28-year-old respondents are members of the Gallup Panel.

For the total sample of 3,793 Gen Z respondents, the margin of sampling error is +/2.3 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. For the sample of 1,687 children still enrolled in K-12 school, the margin of sampling error is +/3.1 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. For the sample of 2,106 Gen Z adults who are no longer enrolled in K-12 school, the margin of sampling error is +/3.2 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. Margins of error for subgroups are higher.

All reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects for weighting. In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

About the Walton Family Foundation

The Walton Family Foundation is, at its core, a family-led foundation. Three generations of the descendants of our founders, Sam and Helen Walton, and their spouses work together to lead the foundation and create access to opportunity for people and communities. We work in three areas: improving education, protecting rivers and oceans and the communities they support, and investing in our home region of Northwest Arkansas and the Arkansas-Mississippi Delta. To learn more, visit waltonfamilyfoundation.org and follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.

About Gallup

Gallup delivers analytics and advice to help leaders and organizations solve their most pressing problems. Combining more than 80 years of experience with its global reach, Gallup knows more about the attitudes and behaviors of employees, customers, students and citizens than any other organization in the world.