As the final waves of Gen Z — the youngest of whom are currently around 14 — make their way through high school and into colleges and trade schools, some higher education instructors are noticing a severe lack of reading comprehension skills in their students. Schools, in turn, are finding the only path forward is to drastically lower their expectations, for better or worse.
As Pepperdine University literature professor Jessica Hooten Wilson told Fortune in a recent interview, “it’s not even an inability to critically think. It’s an inability to read sentences.”
Wilson is one of the professors who’s had to quietly lower her academic benchmarks thanks to the rise in barely literate Gen Zers graduating American high schools.
Rather than assigning reading outside of class, the literature professor told Fortune she’s adopted a kind of in-class popcorn reading, reciting passages together and discussing them “line by line.” Even that, unfortunately, might be a bit of a stretch for students these days.
“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,” Wilson admitted. “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.”
It’s worth pausing here to point out that you can’t really blame younger people for struggling at what were once seen as academic basics. The school system is in shambles, their education was bisected by the COVID pandemic, and they’re been reared in a world that’s increasingly deemphasized reading in favor of videos, voiceovers, and other emerging forms of communication.
Still, the situation is creating practical problems. Timothy O’Malley, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, told Fortune that students showing up unprepared for class isn’t necessarily new, but the lowered expectations are.
In the past, O’Malley said he’s assign anywhere from 25 to 40 pages of reading per class. Students would either do it, or they wouldn’t. Nowadays, that much reading would be unthinkable.
“Today, if you assign that amount of reading, they often don’t know what to do,” he explained to Fortune, adding that most Gen Z students are skating by on AI summaries. “They’ve been formed in a kind of scanning approach to reading.”
The news of Gen Z’s waning literacy comes along with a substantial decline in literary acumen among Americans more broadly. Over the last 20 years, for example, the amount of adults reading recreationally in the US has fallen by 40 percent. Meanwhile, a survey of the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) found that 59 million Americans are reading at a level one competency or below — the lowest level on the PIAAC’s five-point scale.
Whichever way you slice it, younger Americans are barely able to grapple with the written word. Short of major structural changes to the US education system, it’s likely Gen Z won’t be the last generation to experience worse literacy rates than the one that came before.
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