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, books don’t seem to have much value. Indeed, reading now seems to be an activity for the upper class. Reading takes concentration. Today, that is a precious commodity. As Horowitch suggests, “Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube.”

Students at the nation’s best colleges and universities, Horowitch writes, “struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text.” Even at Harvard, many students “are focused on their devices and are reluctant to speak out … often, they have not read enough of the homework to make a meaningful contribution.”

Elsewhere, the picture seems equally bleak. A 2025 piece in the Daily Princetonian written by Ziyi Yan noted that Princeton students “don’t actually complete their overwhelming reading loads.” Yan rightly complains that “Princeton isn’t trying to remedy the national crisis of reading ability,” instead teaching students “purposeful skimming.”

Colleges should make an effort to explain to their students the value of reading. They need to be explicit about that as well, rather than assuming their students will get the message. 

What would that entail? One could start with the 19th century American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, for whom reading well was second-best to close observation of the world. He pointed out the “pleasure we derive from the best books,” and noted the “awe mixed with the joy” derived from reading. 

Awe and joy. Not a bad answer to the question, “Why read.” 

Of course, reading is not all awe and joy. In his time, even Emerson recognized that reading was not easy. Books don’t speak for themselves. Their meanings need to be deciphered.  

Reading, Harvard’s Christopher Brown says, demands that readers “not merely … examine the surface, but … excavate the layers and find meaning across them. … While AI can be a powerful tool, relying on its abilities to summarize texts for us strips us of an essential intellectual act: reading carefully and picking out on our own what is meaningful and worth discussing.” 

Finally, Professor Martha Nussbaum makes a compelling case for the essential role of reading literature in cultivating what she calls the “narrative imagination.” Reading invites empathy and “develops the moral capacity to understand the inner lives of others.” By engaging with complex stories, readers can, in Nussbaum’s view, “become more compassionate, ethical, and equipped for democratic citizenship.” 

If colleges are to have any chance of getting students to read as Emerson, Brown or Nussbaum would have them do, they must first equip students with answers to the question “Why read?” If they do, then everything is possible.  

If they do not, higher education will soon succumb to this country’s post-literate world, and we will all be poorer because of it. 

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.

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