From the back of the classroom, I look out at the rows of heads, sleepily listening in front of their laptop screens. A few weeks ago, I was in their position. Now, I’m trying everything to get them to prove a decade of disappointing statistics wrong.
This summer, I am spending my break as a teacher’s assistant in an introductory political science course, whose syllabus requires students to read hundreds of textbook pages and an accompanying Sonia Sotomayor autobiography.
Despite our weekly reading quizzes, I’ve continually observed students fail to find an incentive to complete their assigned reading. I’ve seen how the simple task of getting by without failing means skimming over the short narrative chapters and completely pushing aside textbooks. Essentially, students have weighed the time spent reading against their reading-dependent grade and chosen not to do it.
Each week, I’ve tried to think of the best summer-friendly tactic to motivate my students to read. Large packs of pastel highlighters elicited mixed reactions; sharing my own reading notes felt unethical (but is that what it takes?). I’m not afraid to get on my soapbox: I’ve even shared my syllabus from a comparable course with a longer reading list. Still, it seems like no convincing will get them to finish their readings.
Truthfully, I’m not sure if I can blame them. A few short weeks ago, I, too, was putting off my arduous reading assignments, letting them pile up through a semester of procrastination. At times, I’ve even caught myself thinking that I might be able to get away with not doing them at all.
In the midst of a purported reading crisis at UC Berkeley (among other college campuses), how do we, the alleged non-readers, make choices about when and what to read? Why do we increasingly struggle to complete the (decreasing) reading workload that we are assigned?
I don’t think we can pass this off as plain laziness.
The structures that shape how we get to higher education, as well as our experiences when we get there, are changing. Just recently, UC humanities and social science professors called for the reinstatement of the SAT and ACT verbal reasoning requirement. As professors report drastic declines in the amount of reading they could “comfortably assign” while expecting students to read a “substantial portion of it,” students must look back on the crumbling foundations that were supposed to prepare them for these professors’ expectations — the reading skills taught before they even got to college.
In the past, an applicant’s academic aptitude was measured and held to the standard of a submitted test score. After the UC Board of Regents decided that racial equity concerns and delays set in by the COVID-19 pandemic made testing more detrimental than beneficial to the admissions process, it phased out the SAT and ACT requirements.
Now, reading might be a thing of the past.
Predating the pandemic, researchers found evidence of a “reading recession,” with COVID-19 acting as a “mudslide that had followed seven years of steady erosion.” The Educational Scoreboard’s data finds evidence of a “learning recession” dating back to 2013 in its May 2026 report, linking back to a “dismantling of test-based accountability and a rise in social media use.”
Should we accept our identities as non-readers and serial scrollers? I think students must reassess the way they spend their time. If they want to adhere to (possibly antiquated) expectations, students should find avenues outside of traditional high school education to rebuild the skills that standardized testing is no longer required to measure and that UC professors claim we’ve lost.
At its core, this is a question of compliance. We can’t claim that students are demonstrating a complete inability to learn. As applicants become increasingly unfamiliar with standardized testing requirements and as it becomes more difficult to complete college-level reading loads, students are pushing back on the idea that reading is the only method of learning. The institution of formal education is being fundamentally redefined by technology, but we must consider its effects beyond the immediate present.
College curricula have already cut down on their reading loads substantially. Academic faculty report deciding to “increasingly excerpt longer works,” distrusting students’ ability to read complete texts. This moves students away from the author’s intended experience of the text — it’s fractured to fit into a syllabus’ ‘story,’ or to help the professor construct an argument. However, physically reducing the amount of time spent reading takes away its meditative aspect and the connection that is curated by an author through the course of a text, stripping it of its rhetorical weight. As professors and students slowly inch back from longer works, we, the students who are supposed to be learning how to consume large quantities of information in the form of the written word, are losing our relationship with its value.
An undergraduate career devoid of reading would be surreal to many. However, it would be inaccurate to claim that our classrooms aren’t worth more than their weight in paper. The privilege of academic spaces is the forum for discussion they provide. We aren’t talking about black squiggles on a page; we are talking about what they mean.
As students, we want to learn, be opinionated and disagree. Universities have long taught students that the information needed to do so is primarily acquired through reading. As AI challenges the true value of our degrees, students must rethink what they are and aren’t doing with what may be borrowed time on our college campuses.
Education shouldn’t be out of reach. Ostracizing students by feeding them narratives of older, more capable generations only serves to remind them of the entrenched inequalities whose brunt they feel when a standardized aptitude test can’t ensure that they are up to speed with an institution’s expectations.
A renewed emphasis on how we talk about what we read, as opposed to just feeling the pressure to silently put our heads down and do it, is proven necessary by the emergence of summarizing chatbots that can simply extract information from a text. Professors must realize the inutility of assigning excerpts as an appeasement strategy. They exacerbate the nexus of the cycle that is pushing students further away from reading and their ability to form a connection with the text. Reading is plainly understood as a mode of information acquisition, one form of education, and students are rejecting it as the only one. Buttressed by being part of a generation falling away from standardized testing, falling into revolutionary technology and witnessing drastic change in classroom culture, students realize that education is being challenged. If they want it to serve them, complacency is not an option.
We need to focus on what makes reading and writing human — the ability to talk about it, agree and, most importantly, disagree — in order to successfully rediscover our identity, not as students who read, but as students who think.