The Atlantic says some elite college students ‘can’t read books’ — can Pitt students?

The kids can’t read.

At least, that’s what reading just the headline of an Oct. 1 story by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic would suggest.

Titled “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” Horowitch’s article presents the results of the writer’s conversations with 33 college professors on students’ reading abilities. Horowitch leads with the story of a Columbia undergraduate who said she had not been asked to read a single book during high school and felt overwhelmed in her core curriculum literature course.

So if elite college students are reading less and struggling when they do, is the same true at Pitt?

In 1976, Horowitch reports, only 11.5% of high school seniors said they hadn’t read any books in the previous year. In 2022, this figure was 40%. For this story, The Pitt News surveyed 19 students during lunchtime in Nordy’s Place. Fifty-seven percent reported reading two or three books for pleasure per year. Only 16% said they read 10 or more, and 11% said they didn’t read any. 

Meanwhile, of 63 respondents to a Pitt subreddit poll asking about their likelihood to finish books assigned for class, only 17% reported always reading assigned books. Forty-one percent agreed that they rarely or almost never read the entire thing.

There are a few reasons people are reading less — none of them surprising. Smartphones and social media provide dopamine hits more quickly and with less upfront investment than reading. Meanwhile, the nationwide emphasis on hitting standardized test targets forces teachers to prioritize testing skills over building emotional relationships with books, and it incentivizes spending class time on analyzing short passages like those in state tests rather than reading broadly.

Marylou Gramm, a teaching professor in the English department, said she saw the latter force in action at her children’s public high school.

“There’s so much pressure for funding based on test scores,” Gramm said. “My kids were learning to skim and scan, rather than, as the [Atlantic] article talks about, read a sustained piece and develop empathy for a character.”

But she doesn’t think this translates to her own students’ reading abilities at Pitt.

Gramm, who teaches courses including Asian American Literature and first-year composition, said she’s had a different experience than the professors in the Atlantic story. Many students say they enjoy the class readings, and several from her classes last semester told her things like “I’m falling in love with reading again.” 

She thinks this engagement reflects her philosophy of choosing books that resonate with students, like coming-of-age stories.

“I’m really no longer interested in, ‘Please just tell me what this book or this poem means,’” Gramm said. “What I’m really interested in is, what are your associations with it? What does it evoke for you?”

Geoffrey Glover, a teaching professor in the department of English, takes a similar approach to engage students, saying he tries to “play up the interesting things, make it personal to the students.”

For him, though, these strategies are partly in response to the cultural and educational shifts reported in The Atlantic. 

“In some ways, that’s meant to replicate some of the emotional landscape moves that these shorter-form digital landscapes create,” Glover said.

Glover acknowledged that “If there’s a group of people out there that would counter the prevailing turn towards short and fairly shallow kind of reading habits, it’s English folks, history folks, philosophy.” Yet he sees the break with books even in his English courses.

Glover said he’s had to assign shorter and shorter readings, or “risk students just not reading it at all.” Though he cautioned that there may not be “enough evidence there, even anecdotally, to suggest, say, a correlation, much less a causation,” Glover said it seems plausible that changes in reading habits reflect the social media age.

“By scrolling through different kinds of social media feeds, we end up training our brains with this dopamine reaction to read shorter and shorter amounts — things that are more and more of a gloss, as well,” Glover said. “So it’s not just that it’s shorter in terms of length, it’s also that it’s not as often deep or as complex or as nuanced.”

This tendency toward speed and simplification can lead some students to use AI to sidestep long readings. 

Lexa Bennett, a junior law, criminal justice and society major, said she’s seen this happen.

“I don’t want to generalize, but I feel like some of my peers don’t really make an effort to consume long-form content anymore, especially books. It’s very much, like, ChatGPT and summarize and get through in the shortest amount of words and effort possible,” Bennett said. “I don’t see how that can contribute to people learning more about the world around them, or being able to meaningfully engage with the things around them.”

Bennett said she was an avid reader as a kid, “to the point where I would get my books taken away in class because I’d be reading during class.” But she pointed out that there are other factors besides technology that affect students’ reading.

“After coming to college, I definitely haven’t been reading as much as I would like, partly because I’ve just been so busy,” Bennett said. “I feel like I’m so exhausted from my classes that I’m not motivated to read outside of my classes, but I’ve been trying to be better about that recently.”

In addition to classes, many students work to afford school, and reading for fun simply might not make the cut when there’s barely time to eat and sleep. The increasing value placed on career readiness in college might also come at the expense of reading.

No matter the cultural tides, some students will always be passionate about books. Several of those surveyed over lunch said they love to read, while Megan Shellhammer, a Russian and Mandarin double major, said, “All I do is read if I’m not studying.”

And Gramm, like Horowitch, brought up the fact that adults have catastrophized over teens’ changing habits since the beginning of time. 

“You could go all the way back to before there were even books, and everything was oral, and you could see all the philosophers in antiquity wringing their hands because ‘Oh my God, things are being written down now, our memories will die because we’re not memorizing anymore,’” Gramm said.

She pointed out that the Atlantic story focuses on canonical literature — and difficulty reading “Moby Dick” might not mean students’ reading skills are in crisis. 

“I don’t feel it’s tragic if you graduate from college and don’t read Homer or Milton or, dare I say it, Shakespeare,” Gramm said. “I’d much rather see you graduate and feel like, ‘I really had a good time reading some stuff and talking about it and thinking about it and writing about it.’ That, to me, is much more of a lifelong ticket to keep learning.”

Rather than concluding that a shift in reading skills is a bad thing, Gramm sees today’s students as equipped for the reading needs of their generation.

“Students have amazing reading skills,” Gramm said. “They’re just different reading skills.”