This is counter intuitive to even most pilots, but it's how efficient the wing design on a passenger jet is. Their lift to drag ratio is better than small planes.
For airliners the retractable gear saves tons of drag, but they also have things like winglets, and lots of smaller things like optimisation on the wing-root (airliners have smooth transitions here, trainers are sort of just square) that all reduce drag.
An airliner is also much less friendly to handle in a stall condition, while a trainer almost recovers on it's own. And similar for yaw stability, if you get the rudder a bit wrong in a trainer nothing much happens, while an airliner will typically start to oscillate. Both of these are solved on the airliner by electronics, a stick shaker or pusher to avoid the stall and a yaw damper to enhance stability. The Cessna 172 doesn't have any electronics involved in flying, only for navigation and those are optional.