Ariane de Gennaro

You’ve read the articles. “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” declares The Atlantic. “Why aren’t college students reading – and what can we do about it?” asks Psychology Today. Do they convince you? Most of us, I think, have felt distracted by our phones. We feel an increasing emphasis on STEM education all around us. And as a poster in the Good Life Center above Commons aptly points out, “At Yale, we often find ourselves starving for time.” These three factors, among others, can make us easy targets of such articles. It’s not hard to believe that college students read less now than they “used to” in the distant, idealized past. But it’s far easier to believe that college students are experiencing a decline in reading than to actually see this shift happening, let alone determine its causes.

First, a few disclaimers. I am an individual with an inherently limited experience of everything in the world, which includes the state of reading on college campuses. More specifically, I am a first year who, therefore, has an especially limited view of reading at Yale. Finally, I am a debater, which lends my writing a seductively brittle structure and gives me a concerningly weak grasp on objective truth. Bearing those factors in mind, and understanding that I can only speak from my own experience, please enjoy. 

Next, some signposting. Keep reading this piece if you are interested in my answers to the following questions: Do students read less than before in colleges? At Yale? What causes the changes in reading that we observe? What are we losing when we read less? What can we do about it? If the imprecision of some of these terms like “students” and “colleges” gives you pause, please refer to my disclaimer above.

I do not know whether college students, on the whole, are reading less in the present compared to some arbitrary time frame in the past. Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicates that the percentage of American elementary, middle and high school students who read for pleasure “almost every day” has decreased steadily since 1984. I would guess that college students have, similarly, experienced similar declines in reading over this time period, but as Rose Horowitch ’23, a former editor in chief and president of the News, admits in the aforementioned Atlantic article, “no comprehensive data exist on this trend.”

I know that I, personally, have read less since coming to college because I have been confronted with so many alternative choices of how to spend my time. I think it is important to distinguish here between an inherent inability to read and a circumstantial inability to read. The headline of Horowitch’s Atlantic article strongly suggests that many of today’s college students are inherently unable to read. Currently, because I spend my time doing calculus problem sets, attending legal trainings, competing in debate tournaments, applying for internships, hanging out with my friends and so on, I do not have the time to read. I do not think, however, that I am inherently unable to read. For my first-year seminar last semester, I was assigned seven whole books to read, including “War and Peace.” I carried Tolstoy with me as I crossed international borders, twice, in order to find time to immerse myself in his 1200-page masterwork amidst my busy first-semester schedule.

It appears that many other Yale students share my busyness. I do not think we are experiencing a decline in reading as such, or even a decline in reading for pleasure, but a decline in unscheduled leisure time overall. Since coming to college, I have experienced increased pressure to participate in extracurricular activities, partake in social excursions, pad my resume and just generally push my GCal to its absolute limit. Certainly, this leaves me with less time to read, but this is just a side effect. And while to some degree, college has long been a place where students have found greatly increased opportunities compared to high school, societal changes have increased these pressures in recent years. 

Horowitch writes that, because middle and high school students are no longer being asked to read entire books, when students reach college, they don’t have the ability to do so. Children’s book author Katherine Marsh highlights the role of American schools’ increasing emphasis on test scores, especially in the public school system, in pushing teachers away from encouraging reading for pleasure or connection and toward instilling the more mechanical reading comprehension skills that standardized tests require. I think both of these authors rightly point out test scores’ influence on teaching styles but do not go far enough in searching for solutions. 

Teachers probably cannot move unilaterally away from “teaching to the test,” especially because federal law emphasizes school accountability as measured through test scores. But even if this move was somehow possible, and elementary, middle and high schools focused on cultivating a love of reading, students would still probably end up reading less once they reached college because of the pressures of the current incarnation of American meritocracy. 

Today, Americans are far less likely to out-earn their parents compared to 40 or 50 years ago, as income inequality increases and economic mobility declines. Students feel anxiety in the face of an increasingly competitive job market, and thus want to specialize early to maximize their chances of eventually finding lucrative work. At the same time, changes in the work habits of Americans in the highest income bracket have trickled down to influence students. According to Yale Law School professor Daniel Markovits, author of “The Meritocracy Trap,” half a century ago, low-income Americans worked notably more than America’s highest earners. “Today, that relationship has been completely reversed,” he says. “Elites work for a living. They work harder than they used to. They work harder in terms of brute hours than the middle class on average, and they get most of their income by working.” 

According to a 2006 Harvard Business Review article, almost half of “extreme jobholders,” those high earners who work upwards of fifty, sixty or even eighty hours per week to maintain their professional success, reported working seventeen more hours per week, on average, compared to five years prior. The elite jobs that so many Yale students strive for are demanding, more than ever before, significant time commitments. And while I have no statistics to support this, I have heard of students at Yale and similar institutions applying to frankly preposterous numbers of summer internships — the highest I have heard was 150 in a year — in response to stringent competition for any available positions. All of this, on top of the desire to have as much fun through social activities and the larger trend toward optimization in our society — read “Optimal Illusions” by Coco Krumme for more on this — pushes students to become as efficient as possible. This efficiency comes at the cost of reading, among other things.

So when students read less, what are we really losing? I have lost joy and whimsy, certainly. Though in high school, I often pursued efficiency by reading while on the elliptical, that was still time I took for myself, which left me happier and healthier. I also fear we are losing breadth. Reading for pleasure can take you outside of your normal fields of interest. In fact, when you open a book, you don’t know where it will take you, which is part of what makes it such a risky investment. Why would I spend seven hours reading a book, and maybe not finding anything interesting or helpful, when I could spend those seven hours on a project and more certainly end up with a deliverable?

The most immediate solution to a time deficit seems simple: just carve it out. But this is clearly no simple task. Carve time out from where? At the end of the day, your balance sheet has to balance. You can’t expect any student to unilaterally move away from their efficiency-driven mindset. This is a pretty simple prisoner’s dilemma — everyone makes the choice that is most rational given the choices made by everyone else. If those around you are maximizing the efficiency of their pursuits, it makes sense for you to do so as well. If everyone agreed to take their foot off the gas a little, everyone’s resumes would get a little lighter. Relative to each other, we would be no less competitive for jobs, and we would likely all end up quite a bit happier. The problem is that we have no mechanism for us to make this happen, and no way for a single student or teacher, or even a single academic institution, to individually make the changes necessary to give students sufficient reading time.

I am writing this article while staring at a pile of unread and partially read books on my desk. “Was it really okay to carry on like this?” Izumi Suzuki asks in “Set My Heart on Fire.” No, I’ll tell you, it is not. But will we change, or will we keep carrying on like this? I don’t know. Momentum is a hell of a drug.