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........

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