College professors face an emerging challenge: We know students are no longer reading entire books
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A survey of 1,250 high school English teachers showed that they assigned an average of 2.81 books to read each year.<br>Malte Mueller/fStop via Getty Images
https://theconversation.com/college-professors-face-an-emerging-challenge-we-know-students-are-no-longer-reading-entire-books-287928
https://theconversation.com/college-professors-face-an-emerging-challenge-we-know-students-are-no-longer-reading-entire-books-287928
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Anyone who has spent time on a college campus lately has probably heard laments from faculty about their students’ reading habits, or rather nonreading habits. Such complaints are more than an unfounded nostalgia for a bygone age.
Reading – not just any kind of reading, but reading long, complex, challenging books – is quickly vanishing from the American scene.
As Sunil Iyengar, who directs the Office of Research & Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts, observed in 2024, approximately 49% of adults reported reading at least one book in the past year. That compares with nearly 55% of adults who reported the same 10 years earlier.
This decline in reading is also reported across some American high schools.
A 2024-2025 survey of 1,250 high school English teachers showed that they assigned an average of 2.81 books for their classes to read, from start to finish, each year.
A separate 2008-2009 nationwide study, which surveyed 400 English school teachers in ninth, 10th and 11th grades, found that they assigned an average of four books annually.
Some high school students are not asked to read any full books at all. Instead, they are assigned excerpts of books or short readings.
“Education Week” reporter Sarah Schwartz wrote in 2025 that there are signs of classrooms shifting away from long-form reading well before high school – as early as elementary school, in some cases.
As someone who teaches humanities and social sciences at the college level, I find these figures shocking, if not surprising. My classes are packed with many texts to read – often long, dense things – and my instruction has been premised on the idea that students would do the reading assignments. In my office, I sometimes hear students complain about the reading load and ask me for skimming strategies.
I generally resist their request and offer to help them learn to do close reading instead.
So the decline in reading poses a real challenge for me and my students, on a personal level, but also for American higher education more broadly. Colleges and universities have not yet figured out a way to respond, leaving teachers like me to devise our own responses.
A person gets lost in a book on campus at the UCLA in March 2023.<br>Christina House/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
The history of reading in the United States
Reading has long been a core part of American education.
In 1636, when Harvard University opened its doors to train Puritan ministers, administrators assumed that the entering class was highly literate – not only in English, but in Greek and Latin, as well.
And as Rutgers University English professor Jack Lynch writes, “Early Americans were uncommonly interested in the power of the printed word, and therefore in literacy.”
In 1647, Massachusetts mandated that every town that had more than 50 households needed to ensure that “all such children as shall resort to him to write and read.” The purpose of this instruction was so children could read and study the Bible.
Thomas Jefferson and other founders also wanted the U.S. to be a place where reading was common.
In 1787, Jefferson praised newspapers and the free press. “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter,” Jefferson observed.
In an 1815 letter to John Adams, Jefferson wrote, “I cannot live without books.”
In the 1800s, schools began to teach students to read phonetically, by sounding out words. “McGuffey Readers,” a series of elementary school reading books that emphasized phonics, were used in American schools starting in the 1830s.
Between 1836 and 1960, approximately 120 million copies of these books were sold, “matched only by sales of the Bible and Webster’s Dictionary,” according to Ohio University’s Ping Institute for the Teaching of the Humanities.
Higher education’s first reading crisis
As U.S. colleges and universities tried to expand and draw in more students in the 19th century, they faced their first literacy crisis.
Students were admitted to newly formed public universities lacking the reading skills those schools expected. Students had to be able to read in order to gain admission, but they weren’t necessarily used to reading complex...