Jessica Hooten Wilson, professor, on Gen Z students’ struggles at university: “It’s an inability to read sentences”
The fear is justified: young people are struggling more than ever to study coherently.
The trope that young people are losing the ability to read and think critically might just be more than a complaint from people with beards and Volvos.
It turns out that Gen Z students are indeed arriving at college with weaker reading skills than previous generations, with some teachers reporting that learners struggle not just with complex texts but even with basic comprehension.
And professors at universities are being forced into changes. Rather than assigning long reading lists, they are increasingly incorporating guided, in-class reading and discussion to build foundational skills - things that should be developed in young age but are being disrupted by social media’s instant-gratification plot to keep us all addicted.
“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.” Two in five Americans did not read a single book in 2025, with the median American reading just two books in total across the year.
“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 added. “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.”
Given this crisis, Wilson has turned to reading passages aloud in groups and discussing them line by line: “I’m not trying to lower my standards. I just have to have different pedagogical approaches to accomplish the same goal,” Wilson said.
Still, reading behaviour among Gen Z is not entirely bleak. While it might make you vomit, the “BookTok” phenomenon that persists on social media platforms keep books alive. A sizeable poll of young readers found that nearly 60 percent of 16- to 25-year-olds credit book-focused social media for helping them discover new books and thus rekindling enthusiasm for reading.
America is in a reading recession:
— Alex & Books 📚 (@AlexAndBooks_) January 15, 2024
The number of people who read on any given day has been falling since 2004. pic.twitter.com/tEYxm1bRJO
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Quick, someone go find the You’re telling me there’s hope? meme. Please.
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