“It’s not even an inability to critically think. It’s an inability to read sentences.”
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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College Students Are Rapidly Losing the Ability to Read
College freshmen are arriving on campuses increasingly unprepared for the basic demands of higher education, with many unable to complete even modest reading assignments.
University-level literature and writing instructor Tyler Jagt highlighted the crisis in a recent essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education, describing how none of his students could finish a 20-page article—an assignment he had tackled without issue as an undergraduate just a decade earlier.
One student admitted struggling because they repeatedly lost track of the paper’s main points, a challenge that appears far from isolated. Jagt points to alarming national data underscoring the trend.
The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed 12th-grade reading scores at their lowest since tracking began in 1992, with nearly one-third of students scoring below the basic level, often unable to draw general conclusions from explicitly presented text. A separate report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation revealed that about 70 percent of fourth graders—roughly two million children—cannot read proficiently.
“What I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch,” Jagt writes. “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.”
The issue is compounded by widespread reliance on generative AI tools, which many students use to summarize or bypass difficult texts, and by the constant presence of smartphones, which studies link to diminished cognitive capacity and attention even when the devices are not in active use. Jagt notes that neural pathways for sustained focus atrophy without regular practice.
“So when a student tells me they ‘kept losing track’ of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition,” he wrote. “The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it.”
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California high school grads score 4.0 GPAs but can’t do basic math, professors say
“A 4.0 simply doesn’t distinguish a student in the way it once did”
California high school students are scoring more straight A’s than ever – but it’s not necessarily because they’re getting smarter, according to data and education experts.
The number of college applicants reporting flawless GPAs of 4.0 or higher has doubled over the past decade even as state testing shows a post-pandemic plunge in reading and math comprehension — revealing a grade-inflation crisis that’s sending students who can’t even do fractions into top universities.
Over the past decade, the number of students applying to the University of California system with straight A’s skyrocketed from 52,989 in 2015 to 103,138 for the class of 2025, with a notable jump during the COVID-19 pandemic between 2020 and 2022, according to UC data reviewed by The Post.
It’s part of a dangerous slide in grading standards as teachers hand out stellar marks simply for doing the bare minimum, according to critics like Glenn Sacks, who teaches social studies in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
“When I was hired at one LAUSD school, the administrator showing me my classroom — a man I liked and respected — told me, ‘Don’t fail too many kids–remember, it’s easier to replace one teacher than 35 students,’” Sacks told The Post.
He cited growing pressure on teachers, which started during COVID and continues today, to eliminate D’s and F’s in order to shore up enrollment and attendance. Teachers were told that a significant number of failing grades meant instruction needed to be revised, he added.
Charles Cole, an education advocate who attended California high schools before graduating in 2001, told The Post that grade inflation has been brewing for decades, only to grow much worse in recent years.
Cole, who attended much of his high school in Oakland, racked up top marks in high school and felt betrayed when he found out he had to take remedial classes at his California State University.
“Those classes were fairly easy for me. It didn’t take a lot,” Cole said of his high school A’s. “I’m happy and grateful for the grades because it helped me get into college. But the level of preparation was a huge letdown.”
Cole, whose organization Energy Converters helps underrepresented students succeed in school, now works with kids in California and across the nation, said high grades can do students a disservice.
“A large swath of these students are functionally — they’re not on grade level,” he said. “They’re multiple grade levels behind, but they have the confidence of, ‘Hey man, I just graduated with a 3.0. I’m about to go to college.’”
California’s state-mandated test results back up Cole’s observations, painting a grimmer picture on reading and math performance than the high GPAs would indicate. Scores on the Smarter Balanced Summative Assessments, which measures student proficiency in math and English, were an abysmal 57% in English and just 30.5% in math for California 11th graders in the 2024-2025 school year.
They have improved since hitting lows of 54.8% and 27% in 2021-2022, but are generally lower than pre-pandemic times, according to data from the state Department of Education.
While the University of California GPA data includes out-of-state applicants, the vast majority of applicants since 1994 are California residents.
“A 4.0 simply doesn’t distinguish a student in the way it once did,” said Marc Zawel, who co-founded admissions consulting group AcceptU. “In our work with students, we have absolutely seen grades become more compressed at the top.”
While grade inflation may not be the only explanation, the rising numbers of high GPAs make it hard for colleges to figure out who’s actually qualified, Zawel added. It’s why more than 1,200 UC professors claimed in an open letter this year they’ve been forced to teach “middle school” math in calculus and other courses, demanding that the University of California reinstate SAT testing as an admissions requirement.
The UCs removed testing requirements in 2020 to appease lefty activists who claimed the exams were unfair on non-white students, but professors now say it’s fueled rampant grade inflation that’s flooding colleges with unqualified students.
“The current admissions metrics, based primarily on GPA and essays, can no longer reliably distinguish readiness for university-level STEM majors in an era of severe grade inflation and AI-assisted application essays,” the professors wrote in their open letter.
Experts told The Post that new habits formed by the pandemic, when classes moved online, likely accelerated grade inflation. Simon Nicholas, who heads a test-prep tutoring company that’s worked with numerous California students, said COVID led to the rise of ”asynchronous classes” — which students can attend whenever they choose — and a ”downshift in rigor.”
Students can miss a call or not pay attention when they attend, knowing everything will be posted online, Nicholas said.
“The idea that we can do these things online, well maybe we can. But is it as effective as doing things in person? Probably not,” he said, adding that the rise in artificial intelligence is only exacerbating the problem.
Others have blamed education leaders for the grade inflation, saying that there’s an incentive to get every student to pass.
“Some districts are handing out high marks to students who haven’t mastered basic reading, writing, and math, then passing the buck to colleges that are left dealing with underprepared kids,” Sonja Shaw, candidate for state superintendent of education, told The Post.
“That’s not helping anyone. It’s a disservice that Sacramento has ignored for far too long,” she added.
The professors asked the Board of Regents to reinstate standardized testing requirements for admission, and officials say they’re considering that request to take up next year.
“University of California has accelerated its timeline to review and provide recommendations on standardized testing,” the UC system said in a statement.
Nicholas agreed on the need to reinstate testing requirements, saying it could go a long way in fixing grade inflation at high schools.
“It would strongly disincentivize” grade inflation, he said, “because it’s embarrassing to say that, you know, we have 48% of our students or whatever with an A, and they can’t crack a 20 on the ACT.”
“It behooves the school then to be more honest, or to be more scrupulous, or more rigorous about its scoring,” he added.
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The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.
In 1979, Martha Maxwell, an influential literacy scholar, wrote, “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect.” Dames, who studies the history of the novel, acknowledged the longevity of the complaint. “Part of me is always tempted to be very skeptical about the idea that this is something new,” he said.Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.
And yet, “I think there is a phenomenon that we’re noticing that I’m also hesitant to ignore.” Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.
No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.
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The Fall of the English Department
and the rise of new stewards
The mid-twentieth century was the golden age of the university English department in the U.S.1 Up until the 1990s, the average English major would have studied nearly every major work from the medieval period to modernism, from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. Today, most English majors can graduate without a sense of literary history. Many programs don’t require a course on Shakespeare.
Meanwhile, outside of the academy, readers are returning to, and expanding, the literary canon. Some of the one-year reading plans found online are more robust than the current curricula in most university English departments in the U.S. Many of the people I know who have read all of Shakespeare (or plan to) don’t study literature at college. They’re simply readers with a relish for language and with eyes and ears for beauty.
Public readers (i.e., non-academic, non-professional readers) are getting something right. For many of them, their reading plan isn’t politically or culturally motivated; it isn’t a part of some cultural effort at preserving “Western values.” They value the canon for what it is, an ever-growing list of works agreed upon by a general consensus of readers that represents what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought or said.” The public readership is also broadening the canon by placing contemporary texts in conversation with “classic” literature.
The university English department, generally speaking, is no longer the place to look for a robust study of the English-language literary history. How and when did this happen? Why did English departments lose so much ground, and how are some public readers now recovering it?
While my last article considered how American universities are facing an identity crisis and how, as a result, humanities departments have changed significantly. In this essay, I want to trace the rise and fall of the American English department as a case study of how this happened, and, most importantly, consider how public readership is regaining the ground that the universities have lost.
The Rise and Fall of the English Major | A Brief History
For most of the twentieth century, English departments were the prize of universities.
During the post-war years especially, English programs enjoyed a steady surge of interest. Many programs were being expanded and given resources. This included both undergraduate and graduate programs. In the 1940s, the University of Pittsburgh Department of English began to grow markedly, awarding 21 PhDs in 1940.2
The “golden years” were somewhere around the 1960s, with the high-water mark being in the early 1970s. According to Louis Menand, U.S. English departments awarded 64,342 bachelor degrees between 1970-1971.3 That means that 7.6% of all bachelor degrees were in English in 1970.
Let that sink in for a moment. 7.6% of all bachelor degrees were in English.
The English degree clearly had a broad appeal and institutional respect. To students it offered broadly applicable skills in analysis and communication, not to mention the familiarity with great literature that it demanded. In many departments, students were expected to read the complete works of both Shakespeare and Chaucer during their four years.
A comparative analysis of mid-20th-century university bulletins reveals a consistent model of a rigorous English curriculum. At Columbia University in 1918, courses were offered on all the major English authors including a course on Old English prose, “Shakespeare as Playwright,” “Johnson and His Circle,” and “Modern Drama.”
The Harvard University catalog of 1950-1951 reveals that all majors were required to complete a full-year historical survey of English literature titled “English 1. History and Development of English Literature from the Beginning to Present.” So that’s two semesters of literature from the Anglo-Saxons to Modernism. The first elective chosen after the foundational “English 1” survey had to be selected from a specific list that was heavily weighted toward author-specific courses, all of which required several hours of reading each week.
Harvard’s 1950-51 course on Chaucer taught by Prof. Whiting lasted two semesters and required students to read all of Chaucer’s writings. “English 123 Shakespeare” by Professor Farnham was also a two-semester course that required students to read all of Shakespeare (including the lyric poetry) with a special emphasis on the major plays.4 If today there is an English major course that requires students to read all of Shakespeare or Chaucer, I haven’t found it. At least not in the U.S.
You also had more focused survey courses like “English Literature from 1500-1603, English Literature from 1603 to the Restoration [1660]” and “English Literature from the Restoration to 1700.”
Similar requirements were standard across the U.S. According to the University of Michigan’s 1963-1964 bulletin, students were required to complete two out of three possible full-year surveys in English, American, or World Literature alongside an intensive writing requirement and a senior seminar.
Things began to change by the mid-1980s. The number of English degrees dwindled over 50% at each level of degree.5 After that, English degrees increased in number but not in proportion. As degrees rose across all fields, the share of the English degree fell to record lows by 2014 (the same year I enrolled in English at the University of Florida).6
By 2018, bachelor’s degrees conferred to English majors were down 20 percent since 2012.7 By 2021, the number of English majors since 2012 had dropped by a third.8
Harvard’s requirements for English majors (called “concentrators” at Harvard) in 1950-1 are very different from the foundational (or “Common Course”) requirements for Harvard’s English majors today. One required course, English 10, focuses exclusively on poetry written after the year 2000. The other three Common Courses are classes on “Literary Forms,” “Literary Methods,” and a tutorial on a specialized topic taught by a grad student. And while most English majors will gain a breadth of literary history in these courses, there’s no longer the guarantee that an English major will graduate with a clear sense of literary history.
The point of this history is not to suggest that English departments have lowered their standards. In many cases, their standards have shifted as the department adapts to the challenges of money-centric university culture. Neither do I want to lament a rejection of the literary canon. Expanding the canon is necessary as more literature is produced in conversation with the time-honored works. Equally important is reading outside the canon. Students should have the freedom to do that. But the valuable approach that many English departments have lost is a systematic study of English-language literature and literary history. Both are necessary for any informed reading both within and outside of the canon. This is the vision that informs the work outside the academy and on Versed Community
Why English Departments Changed
Some on the political right will argue that departments “went woke.” They will point to the fact that the decline of the English department directly corresponds to the rise of critical theory in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Others on the political left will point to the rise of tuition costs (largely the result of conservative legislation), which directly correspond to the decline of the English department. As you’ve probably guessed, the picture is much more complex than either one of these accounts.
Here is my take, which includes a wider sampling of contributing factors:
- Many English departments abandoned a strong curriculum. For much of the 20th century, English departments had a recognizable core of (1) The English tradition (800-1950); (2) Shakespeare; (3) American literature; and (4) literary history. As the idea of the canon began to be challenged and abandoned, the English department curriculum became increasingly unstructured. Departments traded a set of strong required courses for more of a “choose-your-own-journey” model.
- There arose a preference for public universities over private or religious colleges. Between the 1970s and 2010s, students began attending public universities, primarily because they were cheaper (I, as a community-college transfer student, was one of them). But public universities are increasingly interested in the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). Many humanities programs at public universities are not well funded for reasons described in my previous article.
- Tuition costs rose significantly between the 1970s and now. Tuition has surged well over the rate of inflation for several decades. In the 1950s, tuition at Harvard was around $600 per academic year, which, by the way, was way cheaper than Yale or Princeton at the time. $600 averages out to about $7,000 per year in today’s money. That’s a significant amount, sure, but it’s nothing like the $50k+/yr of today’s colleges.
- The rise of theory did not help, it’s true. As John Guillory wrote in his Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (1993): The ultimate social horizon of the latter development is the hegemony of that technobureaucratic organization of intellectual life which has rendered the literary curriculum socially marginal by transforming the university into the institution designed to produce a new class of technical/managerial specialists possessed of purely technical/managerial knowledge. It is in this context that we shall have to understand the ambivalent position of literary theory with respect to literature, since theory is both indissolubly bound to that curriculum and yet opposed to reproducing it as the vehicle of universal “humanist values” constituting a knowledge of a nonspecialist nature. The project of literary theory in its premier deconstructive form was therefore to discard one ideological rationale for the literary curriculum, and then immediately to install another in its place.” (261-2)As I’ve said before, theory is great. I admire the work of many theorists. The dominance of theory wasn’t promoted by the major theorists themselves.It was their graduate students, the following generation of tenured professors, who established the critical orthodoxy of ideological readings of literature at the expense of other more affective, formalist, or aesthetic appreciations. The theorists were all well versed in classic literature from Homer and the Hebrew Bible to Hilda Doolittle. And many of them were excellent close-readers.
- The research model took over English departments. After the 1970s, the American university model shifted to a research-driven faculty culture. Professors were evaluated and tenured based on their publications. As a result, literature became a specialized academic field. This change meant that educating undergraduate students became no longer a serious metric for job-placement and tenure.
- Teaching was deprioritized. This reason is directly related to #5, the rise of research and scholarship. The study of English literature had begun as a teaching discipline. Over the past 60 years, it transformed slowly into a research discipline which produces highly-specialized scholarship read mostly by other specialists.9 Intro-level teaching shifted to underpaid adjuncts and graduate students. Hiring prioritized research agendas. Whether a professor could teach well was less of a priority.
- But the main reason why English departments are in decline is because they have lost public voices. The academy used to be more porous. Earlier professors, such as Lionel Trilling, Helen Vendler, Cleanth Brooks, Northrop Frye, C.S. Lewis, Helen Gardner, Harold Bloom, spoke to, and wrote for, an educated public. When you read these critics’ work, the value of the humanities is abundantly clear. There’s no need to defend why the humanities mattered. No one questioned it. Readers knew why they mattered, and felt it. But now many professors have stopped publicly professing. I once proposed that a certain English department start a public-facing initiative—a podcast or series of public lectures. The proposal was met with confusion and disdain. Although there are many professors who still write for the public, the majority seem uninterested in public engagement. Meanwhile outside the tower, technological acceleration, short-form entertainment, technocratic-market logic continues to dull the faculties of the imagination and disintegrate shared meaning. It’s no wonder anti-intellectualism is on the rise.
If the American English department is indicative of the whole, the humanities have lost cultural influence precisely when society most needed them.
The New Stewards of Literature
A decline in public interest in reading literature corresponds to the decline of the English department. By all accounts, the state of public literacy has only gotten worse with reading for pleasure in the U.S. adult population having plummeted over the past 40 years. Fewer than half of all adults read at least one work of literature in 2015, a concerning statistic that was described as “the lowest percentage . . . since NEA surveys began in 1982.”10 In 2022, less than half of adults reported having read at least one book in the past year.11
And yet… Even as university English departments pared back structured canonical curricula and major enrollments fell, there remain signs of renewed public appetite for serious reading and study of literature.
Looking out on the state of things in 2025, it is clear there are major changes afoot. A major cultural reorientation is underway. The 2020s promise to be a big decade for the revival of reading the classics. Online initiatives such as The Catherine Project and my Versed Community (now with 600 members) demonstrate a renewed desire for encountering works of literature in conversation and with rigor.
Where the universities have failed, some non-academic readers and self-learners are committing themselves to the life of the mind. Readers, writers, “autodidacts,” and communities of learners outside the university are preserving tradition, sharing knowledge and wisdom, improving language, experimenting creatively, and cultivating new fields of the imagination. The public commitment to literature is increasingly counter-cultural. Readers are turning to the canon out of a desire for meaning and beauty.
The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called these readers the “clerisy,” a class of readers that included those outside the academy (teachers, students, skilled and frontline workers, etc.) whose continued education and interest in the arts preserve and support the cultural life of a nation. The health of a nation depends upon this class, which is not a class of academics or scholars or theologians but of average readers capable of advancing learning in all branches of knowledge. He believed that some members of this clerisy would reside inside the academy but most of them would be living lives outside of the universities. In their hands was the “strongest security and the surest provision, both for the permanence and the progressive advance of whatever (laws, institutions, tenures, rights, privileges, freedoms, obligations, etc.) constitute the public weal.”12
On platforms like Substack, YouTube, and public reading groups, many are studying and writing about great works of world literature more for soul-formation and cultural belonging than for credentialization.
The custodianship of literary culture has passed from institutions to the public reader, those seeking wisdom, meaning, beauty, and intellectual depth in an age of distraction. Without the promise of credentials or any external obligation, they have become the new stewards of the tradition. They’re buying classics, reading and expanding the canon, writing and reading close-reading essays and lectures online, and joining grassroots salons. Among them, the idea of “required reading” seems foreign. Reading has become instead voluntary devotion.
This isn’t optimistic guff. This is my firsthand experience, something that very few, if any, academics have. My students and friends on my Versed Community have convinced me that the relevance and vitality of literature do not depend upon the academy. It really rests on all of us. My experience teaching on Versed is actively shaping the way I think of my vocation in the world as a “professor” without an institution and the future of literature and the arts.
Communal learning, even though not “in-person,” is proving that the past works of literature are being enlarged by the present. This renewed stewardship is less bureaucratic and more intimate, less obligatory and more communal, and it may prove the stronger for it. I used to think that the decline of the English department signaled the death of literary study. I have learned that it signals a return of literature to common life and personal encounter. Reading is returning again to the way it was before it was professionalized by the academic study of it. It’s becoming the public commons.
What’s happening is a true renaissance of reading. And it’s important that this revival grows into a place of creativity. We don’t need to recover the golden age of the English department, as much as I admire a systematic approach to literature and its history. We need to create something new, a new relation to the canon. We need a revival of literature that feeds both intellect and spirit and one that is willing to encourage a productive and creative relationship to the ever-growing canon. That’s what our present circumstances offer.
What will the future look like? Will the new stewards of literature go “underground” in an oppressive technocratic bureaucracy like the last remnant of readers in Jules Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century? Or like the Petrarchs and Poggio Bracciolinis of the Renaissance, will they bring to light forgotten literature and usher in a new movement of humanism?
Say what you want about the decline of reading. But something is happening now. While the flames of literacy are dying, the buried coals are heating.
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