{"id":4270,"date":"2026-07-26T15:10:51","date_gmt":"2026-07-26T15:10:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=4270"},"modified":"2026-07-26T15:10:51","modified_gmt":"2026-07-26T15:10:51","slug":"ive-been-teach-college-students-for-decades-most-of-them-can-no-longer-finish-a-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=4270","title":{"rendered":"I\u2019ve been teach college students for decades. Most of them can no longer finish a book"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Students now come to my office not to discuss what they\u2019ve read, but to ask how to skim it. I generally refuse. I try instead to teach them close reading \u2014 the slow, deliberate kind that can\u2019t be shortcut. But I\u2019ve started to wonder whether I\u2019m fighting a trend that started long before these students ever reached my classroom.<\/p>\n

Read more Why lotteries can make winning feel more valuable than buying<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not imagining this. A 2024-2025 surveys\u00a0of 1,250 high school English teachers found they assigned an average of 2.81 full books a year \u2014 down from four books annually in a comparable of 400 teachers. Some high schoolers now read no complete books at all, only excerpts.<\/p>\n

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The decline isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201ccannot live without books.\u201d That inheritance feels newly fragile to me every time a student asks for a shortcut instead of a way in.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t the first time higher education has faced a reading crisis. In the 19th century, colleges expanding access found that many admitted students weren\u2019t ready for the demands of academic reading \u2014 and responded by building preparatory reading programs, a model pioneered at places like the University of Wisconsin and later copied by the . We may need something similar now, except the students in front of me aren\u2019t underprepared by admissions standards; they\u2019re underprepared by a K-12 system that has quietly stopped asking them to finish books at all.<\/p>\n

Read more The \u2018White Lotus\u2019 effect: How fabulous TV locations are reshaping luxury travel and infuriating locals<\/a><\/p>\n

This past term, I enlisted a few colleagues to teach a short course called \u201cWhy Read?\u201d We spent three weeks working through essays on the value of reading by scholars like Martha Nussbaum and Edward Said. What struck me wasn\u2019t students\u2019 lack of interest \u2014 it was how unevenly prepared they were even to attempt something long and difficult.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

Surely, this single course won\u2019t end students\u2019 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\u2019t, or can\u2019t, then higher education will have a bleak future.<\/p>\n

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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 <\/em>Fortune.<\/em> This is adapted from an earlier column published in <\/em>The Conversation with permission from the author.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more \u2018My childhood home is being taken\u2019: Eminent domain for data centers targets properties across a thousand miles of grid expansion in Georgia<\/a><\/p>\n

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I assume students will do the reading of long, dense texts, week after week. Lately, that assumption has started to feel naive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4269,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education"],"yoast_head":"\nI\u2019ve been teach college students for decades. 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