President of Southeastern University Sounds Alarm on Inability of Many College Students to Read
“What happens when students don’t learn to read deeply? They lose the ability to think deeply.”
Dr. Kent Ingle claims this problem is much worse than most people know.
He writes at FOX News:
Johnny can’t read — even in college. I lead a university and it’s terrifying
A stunning report revealed that many university professors now find themselves teaching students who struggle to read, not just to interpret literature or write essays, but to understand basic text on a page. According to Fortune, a growing number of Gen Z students enter college unable to “read effectively,” forcing professors to break down even simple passages line by line.
That trend should alarm every parent, employer and policymaker in this country. It is not just an academic concern. It is a cultural crisis.
At its core, education is the cultivation of the mind. It is the ability to grapple with ideas, wrestle with complexity and communicate meaningfully with others. Those are not optional extras. They are essential for success in the workplace, in civil society and in a free nation.
As university leaders, we cannot simply diagnose the problem. We must also take responsibility for the role higher education has played in lowering expectations, prioritizing comfort over competence and treating students as consumers instead of future leaders. Universities have spent years chasing satisfaction scores and graduation rates while quietly sacrificing the intellectual foundations that make real formation possible.
What happens when students don’t learn to read deeply? They lose the ability to think deeply.
Reading shapes more than academic skills. It forms attention spans, builds empathy, strengthens discipline and stretches the imagination. These are the very traits that make leadership and community possible. When students are conditioned to skim headlines, scroll social media or rely on AI summaries, they lose not just literacy. They lose the habits that sustain wisdom and maturity.
And employers see the effects. According to surveys cited in the same Fortune report, a significant portion of Gen Z graduates feel unprepared for the workforce. Many cite difficulty with communication, lack of real-world exposure and anxiety over professional expectations. The disconnect between what universities offer and what the marketplace demands is widening.
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Comments
Oh, please. Robert Heinlein wrote about this problem fifty years ago in an essay titled “The Happy Days Ahead”, reprinted in the collection Expanded Universe.
If the students can’t read, what are we paying the teachers for?
Can their teachers read?
We pay them to teach arcane multi-step methods to do simple mathematics.
Why did you let them into college in the first place if they can’t read.
Bingo.
“a growing number of Gen Z students enter college unable to “read effectively,” forcing professors to break down even simple passages line by line.”
How about the option of simply flunking them, and thereby returning to a meritocracy where you can be proud again of the name of your college?
My freshman year, it was: Friday — “Here are copies of the IBM/360 Principles of Operation [170 pages]. Get familiar with them over the weekend, Monday we’ll hand out the first assembly programming lab, due Wednesday.”
(Audio: turntable needle skating sideways across vinyl.)
I remember that (AAS/Programming, class of ’90). Shocked my instructors one semester when my course load was: COBOL, JCL, FORTRAN and RPG. Like learning four different languages simultaneously. Kids these days can’t even conceive of such a thing.
There are several teacher and ex-teacher Facebook groups that complain that their administrators told them to pass these failing students and shut up. That’s what many of them quit. Getting parents involved doesn’t work when you hear responses like this one, posted on a teacher’s post: She notes that she was to pass them even if they didn’t turn in any homework.
My grandson’s middle school stopped assigning homework two years ago, His most recent report card has a subgrade for one subject, claiming “homework — A.” Something is really crooked.
(The good news is that he’s off to HS next year, which has a continuous online parent reporting system that goosed his uncle from a C-D student to a full-ride recipient 20 years ago.)
Public education at the K-12 level has become a form of lower indoctrination, not education. The government needs to get out of the education business. Provide vouchers to parents with school-aged children that can be used for expenses at private institutions, and keep the teacher unions far away from those private institutions.