'My college students can't read'

My college students can't read, writes Tyler Jagt in The Chronicle of Higher Education. They can't stay focused long enough to read a 20-page article.

He's taught literature, rhetoric and writing at Mercer University, James Madison University and Wake Forest. "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," Jagt writes.

The 2024 NAEP results show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level since 1992, Jagt notes. "We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise."

His students grew up with smartphones, and now rely on AI, he writes. It's bad for their brains. "Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not 'free students up for higher-order work'.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all."

The brain is a "use-it-or-lose-it system," he writes. "The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it."

Jagt also blames Common Core-influenced reading instruction, which encourages teachers to assign short passages rather than asking students to do sustained reading. As Natalie Wexler points out, "students drilled on finding the main idea' in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that long-form reading requires."

And, of course, the pandemic made it worse.

Some of his students come from schools that taught sustained reading, enforced strict phone policies and didn't teach to the test, writes Jagt. They are able to pay attention. Most are not.

Like professors teaching middle-school math to prospective STEM majors, Jagt is trying to teach middle and high school reading and study skills to college students. He breaks 20-page articles into halves, and assigns "explicit analytical tasks." He teaches "how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis." He shows students how to take notes.

And he wonders: "If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?"

He doesn't have a solution.