A growing number of college professors are warning that Gen Z students are arriving on campus unable to read at even a basic level, forcing universities to lower standards while pretending nothing is wrong quietly.
According to a report by Fortune, professors across the country are encountering students who cannot process written sentences, complete assigned reading, or engage meaningfully with texts that were once considered foundational to higher education. The problem is not limited to elite institutions or remedial courses. It is widespread, structural, and accelerating.
One professor described the situation in stark terms.
“It’s not even an inability to critically think,” Jessica Hooten Wilson, a professor of great books and humanities at Pepperdine University, told Fortune. “It’s an inability to read sentences.”
Wilson said students routinely arrive having skipped assigned reading entirely, leaving faculty to read texts aloud in class and walk through passages word by word.
“I feel like I am tap dancing and having to read things aloud because there’s no way that anyone read it the night before,” she said. “Even when you read it in class with them, there’s so much they can’t process about the very words that are on the page.”
The issue is unfolding against a broader collapse in reading nationwide. Nearly half of Americans did not read a single book in 2025, with reading habits declining roughly 40 percent over the past decade. Among adults aged 18 to 29, the average number of books read last year was just 5.8, according to YouGov, a figure that trails every other generation.
Rather than confront the root cause, universities are adapting around it.
Wilson said she has shifted to repeated readings of short texts across an entire semester, not to lower standards, but to compensate for students’ missing foundational skills.
“I’m not trying to lower my standards. I just have to have different pedagogical approaches to accomplish the same goal,” she said.
Other professors echoed similar concerns. Timothy O’Malley of the University of Notre Dame noted that when assigned traditional reading loads, many students simply do not know how to proceed and instead rely on AI-generated summaries.
“Today, if you assign that amount of reading, they often don’t know what to do,” O’Malley told Fortune.
The consequences extend beyond academics. Wilson warned that declining literacy fuels anxiety, isolation, and social fragmentation.
“I think losing that polarization, anxiety, loneliness, a lack of friendship, all of these things happen when you don’t have a society that reads together.”
This is not a college problem. It is the predictable result of a K–12 system that fails to ensure basic competence in its students. Standards were lowered, accountability disappeared, and reading became optional. When schools prioritize accommodation and affirmation over mastery, they produce graduates who are unprepared for real work, real expectations, and the responsibilities of adulthood.
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