Students are struggling with reading according to universities. This is due to a long-known problem: People are reading less and less, which affects text comprehension.
Professors report that many Gen Z students arrive at universities with significantly weaker reading and text comprehension skills than previous generations. As a result, instructors have to adjust their teaching and sometimes lower their expectations.
The underlying reason is said to be a long-standing issue: People hardly read books anymore, preferring to read short texts, often on their phones. This development is not entirely new but has been exacerbated according to sources by pandemic teaching, digital media, and AI.
Many people read too little, but this has been a problem for a long time
What is the fundamental problem? Instructors and university staff report that young people are having trouble with texts. In particular, longer texts and books have now become an insurmountable hurdle.
The magazine Fortune.com reports that instructors have begun to heavily shorten or simplify texts so that students can still process them meaningfully. This is meant to lower the hurdle to some extent. Jessica Hooten Wilson, a professor of classic literature and humanities at Pepperdine University, explained to Fortune:
It is not even about the inability to think critically. It is the inability to read sentences.
[…]
I feel like I am tap dancing and have to read everything out loud because it is impossible that anyone has read it the night before. Even if you read it together with them in class, there is so much that they simply cannot understand about the words on the page.
As a result, they warn not only of poorer academic performance but also of later problems in professional life, such as text comprehension, self-organization, and learning ability.
Timothy O’Malley, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, explained that students simply are no longer used to reading a lot:
When you assign this amount of reading today, they often don’t know what to do. They are used to skimming.
This is useful for online articles, but far less effective when it comes to engaging with complex novels or philosophical works.
This problem has been observed not only by universities but for some time: According to a study by YouGov, almost half of Americans did not read a single book in 2025, and the reading habits of 18 to 29-year-olds are below those of other generations. Furthermore, it is noted that students increasingly resort to short content, social media, and AI summaries instead of reading longer texts themselves.
A problem that affects not only the USA. Europeans, especially Germans, are also regarded as poor readers: About one in six Germans never reads a book, and according to the Federal Statistical Office, people here spend an average of only 27 minutes a day reading.
How about you? Do you read regularly? Or do you lack either time or motivation?
Streaming seemed unbeatable. But more and more young people are returning to physical media. What at first sounds like nostalgia is, for many from Gen Z, a conscious choice against subscription stress, advertising, and digital insecurity: Gen Z has had enough of not owning anything, reviving a once-dead industry
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