Can We Turn the Page?

Growing up, one of my favorite activities was going to any library where there was no limit on the number of books I could take out. I would just pile them up,” recalls Pamela Paul, former editor of the New York Times Book Review. “As a kid, being told to play outside felt like a punishment and a deprivation because it meant I couldn’t be inside reading. Human beings love stories. Books let me explore different worlds and different lives.”

Times have changed since Paul grew up in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of today’s college and university students spent less time with books during their childhoods than previous generations did. As a result, they often arrive on campus without a deep-rooted love of reading. “I know I’m supposed to say that I like reading, but the truth is, I find it incredibly tedious. I’d rather look at TikTok or watch YouTube videos,” says Kevin, a junior majoring in political science at a public university in the Midwest. “It’s often so hard to understand what the author is trying to say in a lot of my reading assignments. Honestly, I don’t usually get why my professors think I should read them.” 

Kevin’s attitudes and experiences reflect a wider trend. Slightly more than 48 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds (the cohort that includes traditional-aged college and university students) self-identify as nonreaders, according to a 2020 study from the National Endowment for the Arts. The study also indicates a significant decrease in reading frequency and a rise in the number of college and university students struggling to comprehend complex texts. Today’s students are also much less likely to read for pleasure (defined as reading materials not required for school or work) than previous generations. Only 14 percent of students read for fun every day, a decrease of three percentage points from 2020 and thirteen percentage points from 2012, according to a recent National Assessment of Education Progress report. Thirty-one percent of students never read for personal interest. 

“The need to help students better develop their critical reading skills in a more focused and sustained way is urgent and likely to become even more urgent in the coming years,” writes Alice S. Horning, author of The Case for Critical Literacy: A History of Reading in Writing Studies. Reading, she explains, is a crucial way for students to engage with complex ideas, strengthen writing skills, build an analytical mindset, and sharpen their ability to accurately assess information and arguments. Research studies consistently show that when students don’t read or when they struggle to read substantive content, they experience declines in their academic performance, mental health, critical thinking skills, long-term career readiness, and ability to function as citizens in a democracy. 

For decades, faculty members have voiced concerns about worsening student reading habits, but according to many experts, the current situation is different—and the repercussions are serious. Unlike past generations, today’s students face an unprecedented flood of digital media competing for their attention, conditioning them to skim rather than engage deeply. College and university educators say that many of their students are unwilling or unable to read longer, denser texts. Students’ growing detachment from traditional academic discourse, and an erosion of patience for complex material, is compounding the decline. The result is a generation less equipped to handle the intellectual demands of higher education. This isn’t just a reading issue—it’s a crisis in how students learn, think, and communicate. Ultimately, the crisis in reading is a crisis for higher education.

Mollie Barnes, an English professor at the University of South Carolina Beaufort, has observed a dramatic shift in student reading habits during the eleven years she’s taught at her institution. For an icebreaker at the beginning of each semester, Barnes used to ask her students—many of whom are English majors—to name a book they recently read and loved. “In the past few years, I’ve gotten a lot of pushback against that question,” Barnes says. “Students object to the word ‘read.’ So, I recently changed my question to ‘What kinds of media do you like to consume?’ Most students talk about TV shows or music or a TikTok video.” 

Numerous factors are driving the shift Barnes and other educators have observed. “The ability of student minds to focus has altered in the digital age,” explains Gloria Mark, author of Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity and a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine. A series of studies Mark co-led documents this change. In 2003, researchers found that individuals were able to focus for an average of two and a half minutes. That dropped to seventy-five seconds in 2012 and declined to forty-seven seconds in 2021. 

A shorter attention span negatively affects depth of processing, which is critical for understanding what you read. The more meaningfully you engage with information—by analyzing, questioning, or relating it to prior knowledge—the more likely you are to comprehend and retain it, according to the work of psychologists Fergus Craik and Endel Tulving. “When students look at TikTok videos or read a short post on X, they are not actively thinking about it,” Mark says. “Without deeper cognitive engagement, learning remains at a surface level.”

Reading online and on smartphones can cause students to have fragmented attention spans, making it harder for them to engage deeply with a written text, explains Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. The constant disruptive presence of hyperlinks, notifications, and various multitasking options encourages skimming rather than sustained focus. Students bounce between tabs, scroll through content, and absorb information in bits and pieces. When readers skim, they don’t allocate sufficient time for more sophisticated processes such as inference, immersion, checking background knowledge, critical thinking, and elicitation of materials. “This often leads to a loss of the full panoply of processes that make immersive reading a joy, reducing the motivation to read,” Wolf says. “Students also become more susceptible to misinformation.”

Students themselves report that they have difficulty focusing on reading, especially online. Alice, a sophomore majoring in sociology and computer science at a liberal arts college on the West Coast, says she does most of her reading assignments on her smartphone, often pausing to check Instagram and Facebook notifications. “When I return to my [assignment],” she says, “it’s hard to remember where I was or what the author was saying. I get super frustrated and often just don’t finish the assignment.”

Shorter attention spans and a lack of focus also weaken critical thinking skills, the ability to think deeply about what you are reading and to exercise a healthy level of skepticism, according to Tara Well, a professor of psychology at Barnard College. When students can’t concentrate long enough to follow complex arguments or analyze nuanced ideas, their ability to think critically diminishes. In turn, reading becomes more difficult and less rewarding, sometimes causing students to avoid it altogether. “What emerges is a chicken-and-egg relationship,” Well explains. “A drop in critical thinking skills leads to less reading, and less reading further erodes the very skills students need to read well.” 

A drop in critical thinking skills also has wider implications. “Students become more vulnerable to media manipulation because they lack a critical lens to evaluate the ideas and opinions that are being presented as facts,” Well says.

Wider changes in society are also driving the decline in college student reading, including problems in K–12 education. Many schools face challenges like overcrowded classrooms, underfunded literacy programs, high student-to-teacher ratios, and a growing emphasis on standardized testing that prioritizes test scores over deep engagement with learning. 

Government programs like the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) initiative have had an unintended negative effect on reading, according to Tom Loveless, author of Between the State and the Schoolhouse: Understanding the Failure of Common Core. Instituted in 2009 during the Obama administration, and initially adopted by forty-five states and the District of Columbia, the CCSS are a set of educational guidelines for teaching and testing English and mathematics during K–12. Under the initiative, states receive federal funding based on higher test scores and compliance with mandates, such as regularly assessing student proficiency in mathematics and English language arts. The CCSS emphasize STEM skills and nonfiction over immersion in literature and fiction (by high school, the CCSS mandate that 70 percent of assigned reading be nonfiction). Critics of the initiative, including teachers and education researchers, say that the CCSS cause instructors to teach to the test at the cost of instilling a love of reading in their students. As a result, students are less likely to develop the habit of reading for enjoyment. 

Pleasure reading in K–12 is crucial for cultivating reading skills because it encourages more frequent reading, which in turn strengthens vocabulary, builds reading comprehension, and increases background knowledge. As children improve their reading skills, they should progress from entertaining novels, like Beverly Cleary’s Ramona the Pest, to increasingly complex books, such as Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief. Without this progression, students often fail to advance in their ability to grasp a text’s underlying ideas and enhance their critical thinking. To make matters worse, parents are spending less time reading to their kids and role modeling pleasure reading. Shorter reading assignments and the prevalence of reading on screens with the attendant distractions of notifications and pop-ups are also exacerbating the problem.

As a result, more students are graduating from high school without the reading skills, stamina, and analytical experiences necessary for college-level reading. “Students are coming to college having never read a novel,” says Maggie Greaves, an English professor at Skidmore College. “They are just not able to handle the same amount and kinds of reading that students were able to do in the past.”

The long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have worsened the situation. In a 2023 EdWeek Research Center survey, 24 percent of secondary-school officials described the loss of learning in the English language arts during and after the pandemic as severe or very severe. In particular, the shift to remote learning decreased students’ engagement with reading assignments. “I didn’t really pay much attention when I attended school online. My teachers couldn’t tell when I didn’t do the reading, so I usually skipped it,” says Daniel, a second-year student at a community college in Chicago. “I would look at summaries of books to fake my way through discussions and tests. I often stayed up really late watching Netflix on my phone. I felt depressed and lonely. I just didn’t want to study.”

Many of Daniel’s peers are experiencing similar challenges. In a March 2024 US News/Generation Lab survey, 70 percent of students reported challenges with mental health since starting college. When students struggle with mental health issues like anxiety and depression, they can experience cognitive fatigue, reduced concentration, and difficulty retaining information—making it harder for them to engage with and comprehend texts. Reading can feel like an insurmountable task rather than a meaningful or enjoyable activity. And the current political climate isn’t helping. In particular, psychologist Gloria Mark notes, the wave of political attacks and legislative actions against colleges and universities are increasing student stress levels.

The growing number of book bans and educational gag orders (laws and policies intended to restrict teaching, especially on topics related to race, gender, sexual orientation, and history) are also undermining students’ reading. State legislatures enacted forty-seven educational gag orders in 2024, and book bans increased by nearly 200 percent during the 2023–24 school year from the previous year, according to PEN America, a nonprofit that seeks to protect freedom of expression in the United States. Seventy-two percent of educators surveyed by First Book, a nonprofit that works for equitable access to education, reported that when school boards and other policymakers restrict access to books, students’ interest in reading declines. 

Banned books such as Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison are often by or about members of historically marginalized communities. “Students from these communities want to see themselves represented in the books they are assigned and read,” explains Elizabeth Foster, cofounder of Families Against Book Bans and a sophomore majoring in American Studies and minoring in statistics at Georgetown University. “It’s scary and intimidating to us as students when we’re told we’re not allowed to read these books. They are also a gateway to reading other books. They’re relatable, so they get us excited to read.”

When books are banned or restricted—especially those that explore race, gender, sexuality, or social justice—students may see reading as a political battlefield rather than a space for open inquiry, explains Matt Nosanchuk, former deputy assistant secretary in the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Office and the Biden administration’s point person for combating book bans. Such an environment can create fear, self-censorship, and disinterest in coursework, particularly when students feel their perspectives or identities are being silenced. “Students need a nexus between what they learn, what they read, and what our society looks like,” says Nosanchuk, whose position was eliminated just days after President Donald Trump began his second term.

How can faculty, institutions, and higher education respond to the crisis in reading? 

One way is to integrate contemporary books that explore modern issues and themes into coursework. Experts say students are more likely to engage with books that either reflect their lives or challenge their perspectives, such as novels like Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic or Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give. These books provide insights into a range of social, cultural, and historical contexts, inspiring students to expand their understanding of the world and its complexities. Professors can also offer reading options instead of rigid assignments, helping students feel a sense of ownership over their reading choices. Colleges and universities can promote reading through campus-wide initiatives like book clubs, author talks, and reading challenges—all of which create a community around books. E-readers, like Kindles, and apps, such as Libby, also make reading more convenient and accessible. Institutions can encourage their use by providing free or discounted devices and subscriptions.

Some educators are seeing promising results with teaching strategies that employ active and engaged learning tactics, such as integrating traditional reading with new technologies. In one example, instructors ask students to read a PDF of a novel and use a collaborative digital annotation platform like Perusall or Hypothesis to leave comments, questions, and responses in the margins for their peers. This practice encourages active learning and peer engagement, which can foster a sense of community around reading. 

“I thought Othello was boring and hard to understand. Then I saw one of my friends whose dad is Black and mom is White comment on Perusall about how the play related to her parents,” says Peter, a junior majoring in economics at a private university on the East Coast. “I thought that was really interesting, so I reread the play. It’s actually pretty cool and more relevant than you’d think.”

In addition to implementing specific strategies and initiatives, educators need to help today’s students understand why they should read. This includes demonstrating the value of reading a specific text. “We no longer live in a time when we can hand our students the syllabus and expect that they will just do all the reading,” says Mary D. Hinton, president of Hollins University. “We have to connect the dots for them. As faculty, we have to say why a book spoke to us and why reading it matters.”

Well recommends also explaining the cognitive benefits of reading critically, including sharper reasoning and a measurable growth in empathy. Literary fiction, in particular, strengthens a reader’s capacity to understand what others are thinking, according to a series of studies by social psychologists at the New School in New York City. The genre, the studies indicate, encourages readers to imagine the characters’ inner dialogues and to recognize the importance of understanding those who are different from them. “When I read Jane Eyre, I was blown away by how hard it was to be a woman back then. No one wanted to really see her or let her take up space,” says Juan, a senior majoring in physics at a public university on the East Coast. “After that I decided to read a bunch of books by authors like Jane Austen and George Eliot. I started to ask my female friends if things were still at all like that for them.”

Faculty may also want to emphasize the long-term advantages to reading, such as professional and career benefits. “Reading translates into better problem-solving and decision-making skills,” says Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. “If a student wants to become a lawyer, they will need to have tools to understand and interpret complex legal texts. A medical student has to understand the nuances of case studies.”

Reading also prepares students to be citizens in a democracy. “Critical, deep reading allows us to evaluate the truth—and the ability to evaluate the truth is an absolute necessity for citizens,” Wolf says. “Demagogues are aware of the power of lying to people. They are aware of the effect of disinformation and misinformation on the public. People who teach are guardrails in such a situation. Teachers must fight for our students. We must safeguard the reader to safeguard democracy.”

Colleges and universities are at a critical juncture in addressing the decline in student reading, a problem that mirrors deeper issues within higher education itself. The crisis in reading exposes ways in which the educational system is struggling to uphold standards while remaining accessible and relevant. Some say that the only way to meet the moment is to demand more of students. “We’re often on the defensive, especially in the humanities,” Barnes says. “We have to ask more of our students and not always meet them where they are. The stakes are too high to be anything but fearless.”

At this time, those in higher education may have more issues to explore regarding student reading than definitive solutions to implement. “How can we ensure the robust exchange of ideas? How can we ensure freedom of thought without making people feel threatened by it?” Nosanchuk says. “I don’t have the answers, but these are the questions we need to think about.” 

Students themselves have urgent concerns. “I think you need to get real. I have a mountain of student debt, how will reading help me pay that off? I’m scared I won’t be able to get a job when I graduate—will employers care if I’ve read novels?” asks Diego, a student majoring in business at a public university in the Midwest. “I feel enraged and overwhelmed and incredibly sad when I hear the news—is reading more going to help me deal with any of that?”

Maryanne Wolf has at least one answer for Diego: “Reading gives you hope. It shows you the continuity of all the struggles humans have had for all the years we’ve been on the earth. Reading gives you a sense that this too shall pass, and we shall survive. It lets us see that humanity at its core is good. That’s what reading teaches us.” 

Illustrations by Mike McQuade