The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college...
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November 2024 Issue EXPLORE
EDUCATION
THE ELITE COLLEGE STUDENTS
WHO CAN’T READ BOOKS
To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.
By Rose Horowitch
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Updated at 10:57 a.m. ET on October 1, 2024
N
taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s
required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has
changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the
reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this
feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of �nishing
multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many
students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared
to read books.
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is development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a
�rst-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the
early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very
long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her
public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been
assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
Read: Why kids aren’t falling in love with reading
“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. e anecdote helped explain the change he was
seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they
don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.
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����, Martha Maxwell, an in�uential literacy scholar, wrote, “Every generation, at
some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as
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I
professors expect.” Dames, who studies the history of the novel, acknowledged
the longevity of the complaint. “Part of me is always tempted to be very
skeptical about the idea that this is something new,” he said.
Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English
department, told me that his students have trouble
staying focused on even a sonnet.
And yet, “I think there is a phenomenon that we’re noticing that I’m also hesitant to
ignore.” Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated
discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now
his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the
frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall
plot.
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No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I
spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty
meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton
historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less
understanding of language than they used to have. ere are always students who
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CLE. beautifully,” Subscribe
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are now more
exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia,
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�nds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand;
they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel
Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have
trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.
Failing to complete a 14-line poem without succumbing to distraction suggests one
familiar explanation for the decline in reading aptitude: smartphones. Teenagers are
constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of
college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep �owing. “It’s
changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a
psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books,
even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40
percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the
previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those
percentages had �ipped.
Read: The terrible costs of a phone-based childhood
But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in
the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as
No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and
standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short
informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—
mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests. Antero Garcia, a
Stanford education professor, is completing his term as vice president of the National
Council of Teachers of English and previously taught at a public school in Los
Angeles. He told me that the new guidelines were intended to help students make
clear arguments and synthesize texts. But “in doing so, we’ve sacri�ced young people’s
ability to grapple with long-form texts in general.”
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Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has spent almost two decades in
Boston and New York schools, told me that excerpts have replaced books across grade
levels. “ere’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read
Tolstoy? ” he said. And if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders
have little incentive to teach it. Carol Jago, a literacy expert who crisscrosses the
country helping teachers design curricula, says that educators tell her they’ve stopped
teaching the novels they’ve long revered, such as My Ántonia and Great Expectations.
e pandemic, which scrambled syllabi and moved coursework online, accelerated the
shift away from teaching complete works.
In a recent EdWeek Research Center survey of about 300 third-to-eighth-grade
educators, only 17 percent said they primarily teach whole texts. An additional 49
percent combine whole texts with anthologies and excerpts. But nearly a quarter of
respondents said that books are no longer the center of their curricula. One public-
high-school teacher in Illinois told me that she used to structure her classes around
books but now focuses on skills, such as how to make good decisions. In a unit about
leadership, students read parts of Homer’s Odyssey and supplement it with music,
articles, and TED Talks. (She assured me that her students read at least two full texts
each semester.) An Advanced Placement English Literature teacher in Atlanta told me
that
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“It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three
weeks, I expect you to read e Iliad,’ because they’re
not going to do it.”
Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem
to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes—leading to what
Dames describes as a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen. But
private schools are not immune to the trend. At the prep school that I graduated from
�ve years ago, I took a Jane Austen course my senior year. I read only a single Austen
novel.
T
Dames and other professors have observed is distinct from
the problem at community colleges and nonselective universities, where some
students arrive with literacy and comprehension de�cits that can leave them
unable to complete collegiate courses. High-achieving students at exclusive schools
like Columbia can decode words and sentences. But they struggle to muster the
attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text.
Faced with this predicament, many RECOMMENDED READING
college professors feel they have no
choice but to assign less reading and When the Culture War
lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, Comes for the Kids
who has taught literature at UC Berkeley GEORGE PACKER
since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each
week. Now she assigns less than half of
An Ode to Middle Age
that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign
JAMES PARKER
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them will read the whole thing,” Kahn
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told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay,
over the next three weeks, I expect Economics: e Discipline
you to read e Iliad,’ because they’re at Refuses to Change
ANTARA HALDAR
not going to do it.”
Xochitl Gonzalez: The schools
that are no longer teaching kids to read books
Andrew Delbanco, a longtime American-studies professor at Columbia, now teaches a
seminar on short works of American prose instead of a survey course on literature.
e Melville segment used to include Moby-Dick; now his students make do with
Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, and “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” ere are some bene�ts—
short works allow more time to focus on “the intricacies and subtleties of language,”
Delbanco told me—and he has made peace with the change. “One has to adjust to
the times,” he said.
e Columbia instructors who determine the Lit Hum curriculum decided to trim
the reading list for the current school year. (It had been growing in recent years, even
while students struggled with the reading, as new books by nonwhite authors were
added.) Like Delbanco, some see advantages to teaching fewer books. Even the best-
prepared students have probably been skimming some of their Lit Hum assignments
for years. Joseph Howley, the program’s chair, said he’d rather students miss out on
some of the classics—Crime and Punishment is now off the list—but read the
remaining texts in greater depth. And, crucially, the change will give professors more
time to teach students how they expect them to read.
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But it’s not clear that instructors can foster a love of reading by thinning out the
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syllabus. Some experts I spoke with attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in
values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books, they argue—they’re just
choosing not to. Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than
they were in the past. Every year, they tell Howley that, despite enjoying what they
learned in Lit Hum, they plan to instead get a degree in something more useful for
their career.
e same factors that have contributed to declining enrollment in the humanities
might lead students to spend less time reading in the courses they do take. A 2023
survey of Harvard seniors found that they spend almost as much time on jobs and
extracurriculars as they do on academics. And thanks to years of grade in�ation (in a
recent report, 79 percent of Harvard grades were in the A range), college kids can get
by without doing all of their assigned work.
Whether through atrophy or apathy, a generation of students is reading fewer books.
ey might read more as they age—older adults are the most voracious readers—but
the data are not encouraging. e American Time Use Survey shows that the overall
pool of people who read books for pleasure has shrunk over the past two decades. A
couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening
to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly
a relic of an earlier time.
e economic survival of the publishing industry requires an audience willing and
able to spend time with an extended piece of writing. But as readers of a literary
magazine will surely appreciate, more than a venerable industry is at stake. Books can
cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of
someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically
different context from the reader’s own. “A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are
built on identi�cation, identity politics,” Kahn, the Berkeley professor, said. “Reading
is more complicated than that, so it enlarges your sympathies.”
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Yet such bene�ts require staying with a character through their journey; they cannot
be approximated by reading a �ve- or even 30-page excerpt. According to the
neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text
—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-
re�ection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.
Over and over, the professors I spoke with painted a grim picture of young people’s
reading habits. (e historian Adrian Johns was one dissenter, but allowed, “My
experience is a bit unusual because the University of Chicago is, like, the last bastion
of people who do read things.”) For years, Dames has asked his �rst-years about their
favorite book. In the past, they cited books such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre.
Now, he says, almost half of them cite young-adult books. Rick Riordan’s Percy
Jackson series seems to be a particular favorite.
I can imagine worse preparations for the trials, and thrills, of Lit Hum. Riordan’s
series, although full of frothy action and sometimes sophomoric humor, also cleverly
engages in a literary exercise as old as the Western canon: spinning new adventures for
the petulant gods and compromised heroes of Greek mythology. But of course there is
a reason that, despite millennia of reinterpretations, we’ve never forgotten the
THIS ISToYOunderstand
originals. UR LAST FRtheEE human
ARTICLEcondition,
. SIGN and Subscribe Now
IN to appreciate humankind’s
greatest achievements, you still need to read e Iliad—all of it.
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Due to an editing error, this article initially misstated the year Nicholas Dames started teaching Literature
Humanities. is article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “e Elite College
Students Who Can’t Read Books.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission.
ank you for supporting e Atlantic.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rose Horowitch is an assistant editor at e Atlantic.
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