The Numbers Come First
Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College, has spent two decades building courses around one assumption: students would do the reading. Writing in Fortune, he says that assumption now 'feels naive.'
The data support him. A 2024-2025 survey of 1,250 high school English teachers found they assigned an average of 2.81 full books a year — down from four books annually in a comparable 2008-2009 survey of 400 teachers. Some high school students, Sarat writes, now read no complete books at all, only excerpts.
The problem does not stop at graduation. According to Sunil Iyengar, who directs research at the National Endowment for the Arts, only 49% of adults reported reading at least one book in the past year as of 2024, down from nearly 55% a decade earlier. Reading proficiency is declining alongside the habit: 32% of 12th graders scored below basic reading levels in 2025, up from 24% in 2002. Martin West, an education professor at Harvard, has said American literacy skills peaked in the mid-2010s and have been falling since.
Students Ask How to Skim, Not How to Read
Sarat describes students arriving at his office not to discuss what they have read but to ask how to skim it. He says he generally refuses, trying instead to teach close reading — 'the slow, deliberate kind that can't be shortcut.'
This past term he and several colleagues taught a short course called 'Why Read?', working through essays by scholars including Martha Nussbaum and Edward Said. His observation was pointed: students showed uneven preparedness even to attempt long, difficult material, not a lack of interest.
'Reading longer things requires patience and attentiveness,' Sarat writes. 'It cultivates the capacity to follow an argument or a plot, and it requires sustained effort to decode meanings.' He compares the discipline to physical exercise: the most benefit comes with the most exertion.
Sarat notes the United States has faced reading crises before. In the 19th century, expanding colleges built preparatory reading programs — a model pioneered at the University of Wisconsin and later adopted by the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois, and Columbia. He suggests something similar may be needed now, with a critical difference: today's students are not underprepared by admissions standards but by a K-12 system that 'has quietly stopped asking them to finish books at all.'
What This Means for Free Enterprise and Civil Society
The market for human capital is not sentimental. Employers pay for the capacity to absorb complex information, construct arguments, and sustain concentration — exactly the cognitive muscles that go unbuilt when a student graduates having read fewer books than a 19th-century prep-school freshman. A workforce that cannot finish a book is a workforce that struggles to read a contract, a balance sheet, or a regulatory filing.
The deeper issue is institutional accountability. Taxpayers and tuition-paying families fund a K-12 system that, by its own teachers' admission, has progressively lowered the bar on one of the most foundational academic demands. The downstream cost lands on colleges, employers, and ultimately on the productivity of the American economy. Before higher education can be reformed, the pipeline that feeds it must be honest about what it has stopped requiring — and who bears the price when it doesn't.
