Professors Sound The Alarm Over Gen Z’s “Shocking” Struggle To Read Full Sentences

The Gen Z reading crisis is becoming impossible to ignore as professors report students struggling to read and process full sentences.

A new report from Fortune reveals that even at elite institutions, instructors are being forced to ditch assignments to read line-by-line aloud. The decline is being blamed on a “scanning” culture fueled by TikTok, social media, and a reliance on AI-generated summaries.

“It’s not even an inability to critically think,” said Jessica Hooten Wilson, a professor of great books at Pepperdine University. “It’s an inability to read sentences.”

Wilson admitted she now spends class time “tap dancing” and reading passages out loud because she can no longer count on students to do the work at home. “Even when you read it in class with them, there’s so much they can’t process about the very words that are on the page,” she added.

The issue isn’t limited to undergraduate programs. At Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, one of the nation’s top-tier business schools, a professor revealed that up to half of the students every semester now identify as “novice or reluctant” readers. Experts believe years of standardized testing, which encourages scanning for specific answers rather than deep comprehension, has robbed a generation of the ability to engage with lengthy texts.

University of Notre Dame theology professor Timothy O’Malley has seen the shift firsthand. He noted that earlier in his career, assigning 25 to 40 pages per class was the norm. “Today, if you assign that amount of reading, they often don’t know what to do,” O’Malley said. He warned that students are increasingly using AI for “cliff’s notes,” which ultimately miss the nuances of the material.

While some critics label the shift to reading aloud as “coddling,” other educators are prioritizing engagement over traditional metrics. Abilene Christian University professor Brad East argued for a more relaxed approach. “It isn’t important to me to have stress-filled cumulative exams, nor do I particularly care about grade inflation,” East told Fortune. “I want them to learn.”

However, for Wilson, the stakes go beyond the classroom. She fears a future where a lack of shared literacy leads to increased social isolation. “I think losing that—polarization, anxiety, loneliness, a lack of friendship, all of these things happen when you don’t have a society that reads together,” she said.