Anyone who has recently spent any time on an American college campus has probably heard professors lamenting their students’ reading habits—or rather, the fact that they hardly read at all anymore. And these complaints aren’t simply nostalgia for a bygone golden age.
Reading—not just any kind of reading, but reading long, complex, and demanding books— is rapidly disappearing from the American landscape. As Sunil Iyengar, director of the Office of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts (an independent U.S. federal agency that supports the arts and culture), pointed out in 2024 , only about 49% of adults reported having read at least one book in the past year. Ten years earlier, that figure was nearly 55%.
This decline in reading is also observed in American high schools. A survey conducted in 2024-2025 of 1,250 high school English teachers showed that they assigned an average of 2.81 books to read in their entirety each year. By comparison, another national study conducted in 2008-2009 of 400 English teachers in grades 10, 11, and 12 found that they assigned an average of four books per year .
In some American high schools, students are no longer required to read entire books. Instead, their teachers give them excerpts or short texts. Journalist Sarah Schwartz, writing for Education Week magazine in 2025 , noted that there are increasing signs of a decline in reading longer texts in classrooms, well before high school. In some cases, this trend begins as early as elementary school.
As a university lecturer in the humanities and social sciences , these figures shock me, though they don’t really surprise me. My courses rely heavily on reading, often lengthy and demanding, and I’ve always designed my teaching with the assumption that students would adapt. Yet, in my office, I sometimes hear students complain about the amount of reading required and ask me for methods to skim texts more quickly without reading them in their entirety.
In general, I resist this request and prefer to teach them to practice close reading , rather than giving them techniques for skimming texts.
The decline in reading therefore represents a real challenge, both for my students and myself, and more broadly for American higher education . Universities have not yet found a solution to this phenomenon, leaving teachers like myself to develop their own strategies.
The history of reading in the United States
Reading has long held a central place in American education. When Harvard University opened its doors in 1636 to train Puritan ministers, its leaders assumed that admitted students would have a perfect command of reading, not only in English, but also in Greek and Latin.
As Jack Lynch , professor of English literature at Rutgers University, writes :
“Early Americans placed exceptional importance on the power of the written word and, consequently, on the mastery of reading and writing.”
In 1647, Massachusetts passed a law requiring any locality with more than 50 households to ensure that children could “learn to read and write.” The objective was primarily religious: to enable children to read and study the Bible.
Thomas Jefferson, like other Founding Fathers, wanted to make the United States a country where reading would be widespread. In 1787, he praised newspapers and freedom of the press . “If I had to choose between a government without newspapers and newspapers without government, I would not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter,” he wrote. In a letter to John Adams in 1815, Jefferson wrote :
“I cannot live without books.”
In the 19th century , schools began teaching reading through phonics , teaching students to decipher words from their sounds. Beginning in the 1830s, American schools used the McGuffey Readers , a series of elementary school reading textbooks based on this phonics method. Between 1836 and 1960, approximately 120 million copies of these books were sold. According to the Ping Institute for the Teaching of the Humanities at Ohio University, only the Bible and Webster’s Dictionary have achieved wider circulation.
The first reading crisis in higher education
As American universities sought to expand and accommodate more students in the 19th century , they faced their first reading crisis. Students admitted to the new public universities did not always possess the reading skills expected by these institutions. They could read well enough to gain admission, but were not necessarily accustomed to tackling long and complex texts.
Some universities, such as the University of Wisconsin, are responding to this difficulty by creating preparatory programs designed to ensure that new students have the necessary foundation to pursue higher education.
In 1915, Ernest Moore , then a professor of philosophy at Harvard, published the results of what many researchers consider “the first sustained attempt to formally help students improve their reading.” Rather than making reading instruction a separate discipline, Moore integrated it into a broad program devoted to academic study methods, in order to help students understand its importance throughout their academic journey .
The University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, and Columbia University quickly adopted this approach . During the 20th century , standardized tests became widespread in higher education to “assess the academic skills, aptitudes, and even physical fitness of students entering university.” Their results then allowed institutions to direct students to various remedial programs, explain educational specialists Jennifer C. Theriault, Norman A. Stahl, and Kelly J. Meyers.
The current challenge
By 2025, approximately 32% of American high school seniors had reading skills below the elementary level , compared to 24% in 2002. Also in 2025, Martin West, dean and professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, pointed out that “American students’ reading skills peaked around the middle of the previous decade, before declining sharply since.”
While literacy has been presented as one of the foundations of American history, this narrative now seems to be beginning to crack .
I remain convinced that reading long and demanding books is still the best way to help students develop their critical thinking skills and reflect for themselves on the world they live in and the history that has shaped it. However, some university professors have adapted by reducing the amount of reading required and lowering their expectations.
Why read?
There may be another way.
This summer, I proposed, with some colleagues, a course entitled “Why Read?” to a small group of students. For three weeks, we met twice a week to discuss texts devoted to the value of reading, written in particular by the University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum and the Columbia University literary theorist Edward Said .
It quickly became apparent to me that the students had very different approaches to reading difficult texts and were not all equally comfortable with this exercise. I tried to make them understand that, in reading, as with physical exercise, it is often the effort that yields the greatest benefits. Reading long texts requires patience and attention, develops the ability to follow a line of reasoning or a plot, and demands sustained effort to grasp all the nuances.
Of course, this single course won’t be enough to transform deeply ingrained habits or reverse students’ disengagement from reading. But before asking them to tackle demanding texts, we, as university professors, have a duty to explain to them why it’s important to read books in their entirety. If we don’t do this—or if we’re no longer capable of doing so—the future of higher education looks bleak.
Author Bio: Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College
