Colleges across the country are not just facing funding cuts to their funding and decreasing enrollment, but a new and concerning trend is brewing when it comes to literacy. 

Professors are finding that the students enrolling with severely limited reading abilities, according to Fortune. At some schools, teachers have adjusted their standards, whether in decreasing the size of readings for students and changing assignments to be less challenging overall. 

“It’s not even an inability to critically think. It’s an inability to read sentences,” claimed Jessica Hooten Wilson, a professor at Pepperdine University, in Fortune. “I feel like I am tap dancing and having to read things aloud because there’s no way that anyone read it the night before.”

The dearth of Americans reading books could be a contributor. In 2025, only 40 percent of Americans read at least one book, and that number dwindled for every additional book read. But there’s a chance that even with BookTok — a “section” of TikTok for book lovers — Gen Z might be lagging behind reading rates of older generations. Data, however, paints a mixed picture on if they’re reading less than other generations…