US Professors Report Gen Z Reading Difficulties in Higher Education

Professors at several American universities say Generation Z students are struggling to read and comprehend long texts. Jessica Hooten Wilson, a humanities professor at Pepperdine University, told Fortune that many students arrive to class without having read the assigned material and often cannot understand a single sentence. She now reads the texts aloud and breaks them down sentence by sentence to ensure comprehension. Timothy O'Malley, a theology professor at the University of Notre Dame, described a similar decline, noting that students who once managed 25‑40 pages per session now feel overwhelmed by the same workload. Both educators say the trend forces a shift in teaching methods, including reading aloud, repeated discussion of passages, and the use of AI‑generated summaries. YouGov data cited in the reports show that Americans aged 18‑29 read an average of 5.8 books in 2025, underscoring a broader drop in reading habits despite the popularity of book‑related content on platforms like TikTok.