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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
Illustration by Masha Krasnova-Shabaeva
OCTOBER 1, 2024 SHARE SAVE
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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.
I
, 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 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 “read insightfully and easily and write
beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a
Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, 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
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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.”
Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has RECOMMENDED READING
spent almost two decades in Boston and New York
schools, told me that excerpts have replaced books A World Without Work
across grade levels. “ere’s no testing skill that can be DEREK THOMPSON
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. Every Dog Is a Rescue Dog
JOHN DICKERSON
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 e Unbearable Smugness
of Walking
Expectations. e pandemic, which scrambled syllabi
MICHAEL LAPOINTE
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 the
class used to read 14 books each year. Now they’re down to six or seven.
“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.
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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 college professors feel they have no choice
but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who
has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each
week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I
assign books of e Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,”
Kahn told me. “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.”
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.
But it’s not clear that instructors can foster a love of reading by thinning out
the 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.”
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 originals. To understand the
human condition, and to appreciate humankind’s greatest achievements, you
still need to read e Iliad—all of it.
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
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Rose Horowitch is a staff writer at e Atlantic.
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