I have spent two decades teaching humanities and social sciences at Amherst College, and my classes have always been built on one assumption: that students would do the reading. Long, dense texts, week after week. Lately, that assumption has started to feel naive.
Students now come to my office not to discuss what they’ve read, but to ask how to skim it. I generally refuse. I try instead to teach them close reading — the slow, deliberate kind that can’t be shortcut. But I’ve started to wonder whether I’m fighting a trend that started long before these students ever reached my classroom.
The numbers behind my hunch
I’m not imagining this. A 2024-2025 surveys of 1,250 high school English teachers found they assigned an average of 2.81 full books a year — down from four books annually in a comparable 2008-2009 survey of 400 teachers. Some high schoolers now read no complete books at all, only excerpts.
The decline isn’t confined to teenagers. Sunil Iyengar, who directs research at the National Endowment for the Arts, found in 2024 that only 49% of adults reported reading at least one book in the past year, down from nearly 55% a decade earlier. Reading proficiency is falling too: 32% of 12th graders scored below basic reading levels in 2025, up from 24% in 2002. Martin West, an education professor at Harvard, has said American literacy skills peaked in the mid-2010s and have been falling since.
Why this feels personal
Reading has been central to American life since Harvard opened in 1636, assuming its entering students were fluent not just in English but in Greek and Latin. Thomas Jefferson said he “cannot live without books.” That inheritance feels newly fragile to me every time a student asks for a shortcut instead of a way in.
This isn’t the first time higher education has faced a reading crisis. In the 19th century, colleges expanding access found that many admitted students weren’t ready for the demands of academic reading — and responded by building preparatory reading programs, a model pioneered at places like the University of Wisconsin and later copied by the University of Chicago, University of Illinois, and Columbia. We may need something similar now, except the students in front of me aren’t underprepared by admissions standards; they’re underprepared by a K-12 system that has quietly stopped asking them to finish books at all.
What I tried this summer
This past term, I enlisted a few colleagues to teach a short course called “Why Read?” We spent three weeks working through essays on the value of reading by scholars like Martha Nussbaum and Edward Said. What struck me wasn’t students’ lack of interest — it was how unevenly prepared they were even to attempt something long and difficult.
It was clear to me that the students had very different approaches to and comfort with reading difficult material. I tried to help them see that when it comes to reading, similar to physical exercise, the most benefit comes with the most exertion. Reading longer things requires patience and attentiveness, it cultivates the capacity to follow an argument or a plot, and it requires sustained effort to decode meanings.
Surely, this single course won’t end students’ entrenched habits and reverse their retreat from reading. But before we ask our students to read difficult material, those of us who teach in college owe it to all of them to explain that reading books in their entirety matters. If we won’t, or can’t, then higher education will have a bleak future.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune. This is adapted from an earlier column published in The Conversation with permission from the author.
