The Reading Crisis in Higher Education That Nobody Wants to Talk About
Faculty across disciplines report that students arrive at university unable to sustain attention through complex texts. The data is sobering, and the response is uneven.
A growing body of evidence suggests that incoming university students in 2026 read longer texts less effectively than students did a decade ago. The trend has been visible to faculty for years; only recently has it begun to show up in standardized measures and published research.
A 2025 study from the University of Virginia tested 850 incoming first-year students on a 12-page primary-source historical document followed by comprehension questions. Compared to a similar 2014 cohort tested under identical conditions, the 2024 cohort scored 17 percent lower on inference questions and 23 percent lower on questions requiring synthesis across multiple passages. Total reading time also dropped by roughly four minutes for the same material.
What Faculty Are Reporting
The empirical findings track with widespread faculty observations. In a 2025 survey of 1,840 humanities and social science professors across 60 US universities, 71 percent said students struggled to complete assigned readings longer than 20 pages, and 58 percent said they had reduced reading loads in their courses over the past five years.
“I assign half of what I assigned in 2015, and the students still tell me it is too much,” said Dr. Iolanthe Carvalho, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin. “I am not blaming the students. They are doing what they have been trained to do, which is to read in fragments.”
The Phone Hypothesis Is Only Part of the Story
Smartphone use is the most commonly cited culprit, and the link is real. A 2024 study from Stanford using app-blocking interventions found that students who reduced phone use during reading sessions improved comprehension by an average of 11 percent within two weeks. But researchers caution that the issue is not solely about phones.
“What we are seeing is the cumulative effect of a decade of reading change,” said Dr. Tomás Esquivel, a cognitive scientist at Vanderbilt who studies reading habits. “The phone is part of it. So is the way K-12 reading instruction shifted toward shorter excerpts. So is the rise of audio and video as primary information sources. You cannot isolate one cause.”
The College Response Has Been Uneven
Some universities have begun reading interventions. Dartmouth introduced a first-year “Reading at Pace” workshop in 2024 that requires students to read assigned texts in supervised conditions, with phones collected at the door. Early data suggests that students who complete the workshop maintain higher comprehension scores through their first year.
Other institutions have moved in the opposite direction, shortening assigned texts and providing AI-generated summaries. Critics argue this accommodates the symptom while worsening the underlying problem. “If you give students a shortcut around the difficulty of reading, they will take it,” said Dr. Esquivel. “We are not doing them favors.”
What Students Themselves Say
Students often describe the experience as exhausting rather than impossible. A 2025 focus-group study at three state universities found that students could read long texts but reported that doing so required intense effort and produced more fatigue than equivalent work in 2014 would have. Many described their attention as feeling “thinner.”
“I can read it. I just notice myself wanting to check my phone every two pages,” said one undergraduate quoted in the study. “By the end I feel like I went for a run.”
What Helps
The interventions with the best evidence are unglamorous: longer dedicated reading sessions, phone-free environments, and reading the same text twice with different purposes. A 2026 trial at the University of Indiana found that asking students to write a one-paragraph summary after reading produced larger comprehension gains than highlighting or note-taking.
For incoming students, the practical implication is that reading capacity, like physical fitness, can be rebuilt with deliberate practice. The trickier institutional question is whether universities will invest in supporting that practice or quietly lower expectations.
The Technology Question
The role of technology in the reading decline is real but complex. Smartphones, tablets, and laptops produce the distraction patterns that affect sustained attention. The devices also provide access to reading materials that previous generations of students did not have. The net effect depends on how students use the technology, which depends in turn on the habits they have developed and the structures their environments provide.
The Pedagogical Response
Several universities have begun adjusting their teaching in response to reading capacity changes. Some assign less reading but ask for more substantive engagement with what is assigned. Others have invested in reading workshops, supported reading rooms, and faculty support for students who struggle with long-form material. The interventions produce modest improvements that compound when sustained across the undergraduate years.
The Implications for K-12
The college reading crisis has implications for K-12 education. Students who arrive at college without the capacity for sustained reading typically did not develop that capacity in earlier schooling. The K-12 systems that have maintained long-form reading expectations and that have not over-relied on excerpts produce graduates with stronger college reading preparation than systems that have prioritized standardized test preparation over sustained literacy work.
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