Colleges and universities are failing students in today’s ‘post-literate’ era

Americans seem to have given up on reading books. Surveys show that almost 40 percent read no books at all over the course of a year. Just 27 percent read between one and four books each year. Serious, sustained reading is concentrated in an increasingly narrow slice of the population.

Moreover, the commitment to reading is much greater among older people than among younger ones. The New York Times has pointed to a collapse in reading among high schoolers. “Many teenagers,” it reports, “are assigned few full books to read from beginning to end — often just one or two per year.”  

All of this poses a serious problem for higher education — especially for liberal arts colleges that have built curricula around extensive reading, discussion and writing about what students read. In colleges across the country, Professor Rose Horowitch observes, “students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester.”  

So far, most colleges and universities have not addressed this problem systematically, let alone figured out how to respond. But ignoring it won’t make it go away. 

If they are to survive America’s post-literate era and serve society in the future, colleges need to invest in programs that answer the question, “Why read?” They must also design courses where the techniques of close reading are taught.

In the post-literate society,........

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