As Gen Z abandons books, students are entering classrooms unable to complete the assigned reading as per previous expectations. This leaves colleges with no option but to lower their expectations.
One astonished professor has described young adults arriving in class unable to read a single sentence.
“It’s not even an inability to think critically,” Jessica Hooten Wilson, a professor of great books and humanities at Pepperdine University told . “It’s an inability to read sentences.”
Her observation reflects a broader trend: nearly in 2025, with the habit dropping by approximately 40% over the past decade. And even though young people are embracing BookTok, a TikTok subcommunity dedicated to books and literature, Gen Z’s reading habits still lag behind those of all other generations. According to YouGov, Americans aged 18 to 29 read an average of just 5.8 books in 2025.
“I feel like I’m dancing around and having to read things aloud because there’s no way anyone read it the night before,” Wilson admitted. “Even when you read it with them in class, there’s so much they can’t process about the words on the page.”
Students are having trouble reading long passages
With students struggling, academics have been compelled to adapt—a move critics describe as “.”
For her part, Wilson has resorted to reading passages aloud together, discussing them line by line, or repeatedly returning to a single poem or text over the course of a semester—in part so that students can start to develop the skills to read critically on their own and be prepared for their post-graduate careers.
“I’m not trying to lower my standards,” Wilson said. “I just have to use different teaching methods to achieve the same goal.”
For Timothy O’Malley, a theology professor at the University of Notre Dame, adapting to changes in student behavior hasn’t been particularly difficult. He argued that it’s always been his job to tailor classes to students’ needs. Moreover, he said that students showing up to class unprepared isn’t new.
Early in his career, O’Malley typically assigned 25 to 40 pages of reading per class—and students would either do it or admit they were struggling.
“Today, if you assign that much reading, they often don’t know what to do,” O’Malley said— noting that many students instead just rely on AI summaries and miss the point of the assigned reading.
He attributes part of the problem to earlier stages of education, where reading has been regarded as a means to an end rather than a pleasure or habit. Years of, he argued, have also trained students to scan for information rather than engage with complex texts.
“They’ve been shaped into a kind of scanning approach to reading,” he said—useful for skimming news articles online, but far less effective for engaging with dense novels or philosophical works.
Reading is declining—and it could have far-reaching effects
One major problem among college students isn’t hostility towards reading so much as a lack of confidence and stamina.
When professors reduce anxiety about grades, students are often willing to attempt the reading list, according to Brad East, a theology professor at Abilene Christian University.
In his course, he hasn’t changed the reading length or difficulty but has instead adjusted the assignments in light of generative AI to stimulate genuine critical thinking.
“Having stress-filled cumulative exams isn’t important to me, nor do I particularly care about grade inflation,” East told . “I want them to learn.”
The confidence issue is something that Brooke Vuckovic, a professor at, has observed among business school students. Each term, roughly 40-50% of her students describe themselves as novice or reluctant readers, but once they are encouraged to start reading, she said, the change can be immediate.
And despite Gen Z’s move away from reading, the habit remains popular among the ultra-wealthy. A JPMorgan survey of more than 100 billionaires released last month found that reading ranks as the top habit that elite achievers have in common.
The consequences of declining literacy extend far beyond grades, classroom performance, or even.
Reading, Wilson said, is a way of seeing ideas from other people’s perspectives—leading to increased empathy and a sense of community.
“I think losing that polarization, anxiety, loneliness, lack of friendship, all of these things occur when you don’t have a society that reads together.”