The Decline in Literacy Rates Among Elite College Students: A Growing Concern
The ability to read and comprehend complex texts is fundamental to success in higher education and beyond. However, a growing number of professors at elite colleges and universities are observing a concerning trend: incoming students, even those with high academic achievements, are increasingly struggling with reading comprehension and the ability to engage with long-form texts. This article delves into the factors contributing to this decline in literacy rates among elite college students, its potential consequences, and possible solutions.
The Observation: Students Struggling with Reading
Nicholas Dames, a Literature Humanities professor at Columbia University since 1998, has noticed a significant change in his students' ability to handle assigned readings. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading, feeling bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. Dames's colleagues have observed the same problem: many students no longer arrive at college-even at highly selective, elite colleges-prepared to read books. This issue isn't limited to Columbia University. Professors at other prestigious institutions, such as Princeton, the University of Virginia, and Georgetown, have reported similar experiences. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, noted that his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds 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, has observed that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.
Jessica Hooten Wilson, a professor of great books and humanities at Pepperdine University, observes that students are arriving to classrooms unable to complete assigned reading on par with previous expectations. “It’s not even an inability to critically think,” she told Fortune. She admitted, “I feel like I am tap dancing and having to read things aloud because there’s no way that anyone read it the night before.”
Root Causes: Why Are Students Struggling?
Several factors contribute to the decline in literacy rates among elite college students.
Changes in Secondary Education
One significant factor is a shift in educational practices in middle and high schools. 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. Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has spent almost two decades in Boston and New York schools, said that excerpts have replaced books across grade levels.
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Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, explained that the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts, but “in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general.” Carol Jago, a literacy expert, says that educators tell her they’ve stopped teaching the novels they’ve long revered, such as My Ántonia and Great Expectations. The 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.
The Distraction of Technology
Smartphones and other digital devices contribute to the problem. 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 flowing. Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, stated, “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention.” 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 flipped. Gen Z grew up with Google, smartphones, and social media, "all of which provide quick and easy hits of information requiring lower cognitive loads than long-form articles and books," Professor Liz Swan said at Psychology Today.
Shift in Values and Priorities
Some experts believe that the decline of book reading is due 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. 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 inflation (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.
The Confidence Issue
The confidence issue is something that Brooke Vuckovic, a professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, has seen among business school students.
Consequences: The Impact of Declining Literacy
The consequences of declining literacy extend far beyond grades, classroom performance, or even future careers.
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Reduced Cognitive Abilities
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-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not. When literacy declines, so does our collective ability to think critically, solve problems, and participate fully in our communities.
Narrowed Worldview
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. Kahn, the Berkeley professor, said, “A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics. Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges your sympathies.” Yet such benefits require staying with a character through their journey; they cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt. Having limited experience with reading books also means they do not have the "context to understand certain arguments or points of view," said The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Impact on the Publishing Industry
The economic survival of the publishing industry requires an audience willing and able to spend time with an extended piece of writing.
Adaptations and Solutions: Addressing the Challenge
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. The 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.)
Timothy O’Malley, a theology professor at the University of Notre Dame, adapts classes to students' needs. He traces part of the problem to earlier stages of education, where reading has been framed as a means to an end rather than a pleasure or habit.
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Re-Evaluating Curriculum
Some experts I spoke with attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. 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.
Strategies for Improvement
Using a stable, predictable routine helps students internalize strategies and reduces cognitive burden. Intentionally adding motivational support structures is important for students, particularly those in Grade 4 who experienced declines in their value for reading non-fiction. Selecting texts that are connected with content-area units and aligned with students’ background knowledge in areas such as social studies and science strengthens literacy development and content understanding.
The Future of Reading: Adapting to a Changing Landscape
Other professors simply see the shift away from books as part of the natural progression of communication. Just as the written word led to the decline of oral culture, the rise of truncated writing and the popularity of video/audio content will shift how we communicate again, Stuart Patterson, chair of the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, said to the Chronicle of Higher Education. That shift toward a "hybrid oral-written culture" will be a long-lasting change that is in "some ways more important" than change brought about by the pandemic or testing culture.
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