How Much Do Students Really Read?

Ava Wherley likes to read—especially thrillers. She rarely reads nonfiction, but when she does, she prefers suspenseful tales of true crime.

Reading for school is another matter. Wherley, a sophomore biology major at the University of Florida, is assigned about 100 pages of reading a week for three classes—most of which she skips in favor of gleaning the information from YouTube videos.

“I’m someone that learns really well from videos and things being visually explained to me, which is something the textbook isn’t usually really good at,” she said, adding that academic texts tend to use overly complex language, which makes them harder to read.

Wherley is hardly the only student to shirk reading; in interviews with current college students, only one—a freshman who said he is assigned only about five pages each week—told Inside Higher Ed that they typically complete their reading assignments. Some skim, some use artificial intelligence to create summaries and some rely on old-fashioned human-written summaries, such as SparkNotes, to stay on top of the material.

Researchers have long observed that a small—and declining—number of students actually complete their assigned readings; a study of reading quizzes taken in a psychology class between 1981 and 1997 showed a decreasing number of students doing so even then. More recently, in a 2021 study of hospitality students, over 70 percent said they don’t read the texts their professors assign.

Few professors would argue with that data. Faculty frequently note how much less willing their Gen Z students are to read for class than earlier generations; in a discussion on X over the summer, faculty complained that students seem unequipped to read even 100 pages per week per class—which used to be the norm in many disciplines, especially the humanities.

“Reading deeply and widely for many hours a day is the only way to become educated in an academic field. There are no shortcuts to this. If our students cannot read more than 100 pages per day or focus for more than 20 minutes at a time, they are never going to be educated,” wrote one X user, who self-identified as a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University.

But explanations vary as to why students read less. And some academics argue that whatever the reason, the decline in reading is not worth the hand-wringing and despair it often provokes.

Everyone—especially Gen Zers, who were raised with constant access to social media—has a shorter attention span than they did before the internet. In addition, some endured ineffective reading instruction techniques or attended K-12 schools that de-emphasized reading full novels in favor of short excerpts like those that appear on standardized tests. Perhaps most significantly, many of today’s college students spent their pivotal school years learning from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, which stifled academic growth. A large number of students also hold jobs and participate in extracurricular activities while in college, reducing their bandwidth to do excessive amounts of homework.

Some argue that the decline in reading represents a natural shift as the world moves toward other forms of media—and that universities need to keep up.

“We’ve always had to adapt to changes. Students in the ’70s didn’t read like students in the ’20s,” said Paula Krebs, executive director of the Modern Language Association, the largest scholarly organization for the humanities. “We’re about teaching students how to analyze the kind of culture around them and the culture that’s most significant in determining the lives they lead.”

Why Students Don’t Read

College students themselves say they often choose not to complete their assigned readings because they’re busy with other obligations, or they don’t find the material particularly important.

“I have a 20-hour-a-week job already, plus I run a student organization … [so] I need to be very selective with my time. If this reading isn’t something that’s absolutely necessary for me to read to get an A, then I either won’t read it, or, if it’s interesting, I’ll skim it, probably,” said Connor Effrain, a UF student and a friend of Wherley’s.

Effrain, a history major, reads about 250 pages per week but often uses artificial intelligence to lighten the load: He runs his assigned readings through ChatGPT to generate summaries of the text. The technology has gotten so advanced, he said, that it can answer specific questions about the text or identify quotes he might need.

“I love history. It’s interesting to read about, but since I have so much responsibility with my job, I don’t have the time to literally read every single word that gets assigned,” he said.

Quentin Hoglund, a master’s student at the University of Maryland, also said AI has become a regular part of his schoolwork. He asks ChatGPT to make him flash cards and other study tools based on the readings he uploads, which he said is one of the most common ways his classmates utilize the technology.

“I think people definitely want to avoid any sort of academic dishonesty, or meeting with some sort of judicial board that will threaten their enrollment at the university,” he said. “So I think [we’re] just using it in ways that can still give you an advantage and save you some time as well.”

Occasionally, using AI as a study tool has backfired, Effrain and Hoglund both admitted. Effrain has taken a few exams that asked hyperspecific questions for which he was underprepared, given that he’d only studied summaries. And Hoglund said he’s sometimes seen ChatGPT spit out incorrect information about the readings, prompting him to take extra steps to verify anything the chat bot teaches him.

Students also say they tend to avoid readings when the material feels redundant with what they learn in lecture—or when it doesn’t come up in class at all.

Mia Clarizio, a fine arts major with a political science minor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, said she generally tries to do all of her reading—which, in her art courses, tends to number fewer than 20 pages per class per week. But many of her peers in the major skip the reading assignments entirely, figuring they learn by—and are graded on—doing projects and creating art.

“For me, it really depends on the professor. If the professor has been doing their job for a long time and is really engaging and gets a lot of participation out of the class, I’m willing to do more than I’m required to,” she said.

Literature Students Stand Out

English majors who spoke with Inside Higher Ed viewed reading differently than many of their peers in other majors. While they are assigned more pages than other students, they are more enthusiastic about getting the reading done.

Birb Rhaman, a second-year literature student at the University of Texas at Dallas, often has to read more than 600 pages per week. In one comparative literature course this semester, Rhaman might need to read multiple books in a week, which can be hard given that they have “terrible time-management” skills, they said; Rhaman estimates they manage to complete about two-thirds of all assigned readings.

Both Rhaman and Anlie Williams, a first-year English Ph.D. student at Vanderbilt University, said that part of being a literature student is learning how to process readings more efficiently. Before reading academic books, Williams often consults reviews to get an early handle on the argument the author is making, which makes it easier to parse the text more quickly.

Of course, even book-loving English students adopt the habits of their peers in non-literature classes. Rhaman recalled a state and local government course they took to fulfill a requirement, which contained a lot of material they already knew. “So, I would just skim the reading and then do the quiz for the class,” Rhaman said. “And I would typically do just fine. In some cases, I would skip the readings entirely, because the presentations cover the reading.”

A New Era of Teaching Reading

For professors, the decline of reading can be challenging. Already it has catalyzed new techniques for teaching reading; Matthew Boedy, an English professor at the University of North Georgia, said he starts his freshman classes by asking students, who often report that they’d never read anything longer than a handful of pages, to read a 25-page essay.

“There are many reasons why I choose it, but one of the reasons is, it is long. I start by telling them that what you’re going to read is long, and you should try to read it in one sitting, and it is going to take a couple hours to do so,” he said. “I put that essay on the syllabus multiple days in a row, because I know they’re not going to read it the first time. They’re also not going to read it the second time all the way through.”

Josh Martin, an English professor at Tusculum University, a private Presbyterian institution in Tennessee, has resorted to elementary school–style methods of reading instruction. Students in his courses are required to spend the first 15 minutes of every class reading; that way, those who do not read on their own have an opportunity to catch up, while those who completed the reading can go back and highlight or take notes on the text.

He also leads what he refers to as “guided readings,” in which he reads aloud to the class and helps them navigate the text with specific questions and prompts.

“I don’t mean [‘elementary’] as a bad thing at all—I think it’s the best thing we could be doing … Students are not reading as deeply on their own. They’re just not doing it. If I can find a way to encourage reading in class while they’re sitting there, that, I think, is the best way to go about it,” he said.

One researcher, Sarah Jerasa, argues that today’s students are not unwilling to read in general but face specific barriers to reading texts for school. Jerasa has studied BookTok, a huge community of young readers who discuss books on the short-form video app TikTok. Members of Gen Z are still exceptionally enthusiastic about reading, she’s found, but they’re only interested in texts that resonate with them or are part of the cultural zeitgeist, like the viral fantasy romances of Sarah J. Maas or the controversial works of romance writer Colleen Hoover.

“In comparison to what happens in schools, where oftentimes your professor or your teacher is assigning what must be read, in BookTok, there’s a lot more autonomy—you’re reading in order to be a part of a conversation that you want to be a part of. You want to engage,” said Jerasa, a professor of literacy at Clemson University. “If you’re reading for the purpose of, ‘I have to master all this information’ or ‘I have to master this in order to do an exam,’ you’re reading for a very different purpose, and the way you read changes.”

But what can professors do to bring even an iota of BookTok’s excitement into the classroom?

It might involve introducing students to the text in a more accessible way, such as through audiobooks or text-to-voice software, some professors say. It might require more guidance on the reading conventions of each discipline, highlighting the difference between how one reads a novel compared to, say, a scholarly article about chemistry. Or it might mean moving away from books altogether to focus more broadly on teaching critical thinking skills.

“Every self-respecting language or literature department is incorporating new media into what it teaches and helping students to understand how to have a critical perspective on it in the way that we’ve always helped students understand how to have a critical perspective on the 19th-century novel,” said Krebs of the Modern Language Association. “Books are still selling. People are still reading. I think we can’t persuade students to read what we want to teach them; we have to teach what students want to read. It’s about teaching skills and values and perspectives, not simply content.”

(This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Matthew Boedy's name.)