Here's a shock for you (not). 

College students aren't reading the assigned texts for their college classes. 

I can confirm that over the last decade I have seen a precipitous drop in freshmen reading comprehension. Most won't even scroll down online. If you put an instruction on the bottom of the page, half the class will miss it. https://t.co/Q3a72zhRZO

— J. Whitebread (aka Travis Lee Clark) (@JWhitebread1) May 21, 2024

This time--I promise you I will get back to my regularly scheduled bashing of the young whippersnappers--I am not going to waste any time talking about how much better it was in my day and how Gen Z are a bunch of lazy communists. I'm not even going to whinge about how stupid they are because I actually don't believe that's true. My gut sense is that they are as a group pretty smart, although there is a worrying trend in IQ measures indicating that intelligence measures are for the first time trending down. 

Yes, that is a real thing, and it should scare you. For decades IQ had been escalating quickly, meaning that the tests had to be renormed to ensure that 100 remained average. Soon it will be renormed in the wrong direction. 

But for this essay I will look mainly at what professors are saying, and it isn't good. Students are coming in with poor reading skills and short attention spans, and over time the penalties for not doing the work have evaporated. 

If you can get away without reading, why do the work?

Many college students don't read very well, their professors say. And they don't think they should have to work very hard. "Some struggle with reading endurance and weak vocabulary,"  writes Beth McMurtrie in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Others aren't willing to struggle. 

Furthermore, "a significant number of those who do the work seem unable to analyze complex or lengthy texts," say professors at colleges ranging from Wellesley to Cal State LA. Students don’t seem to "have the context to understand certain arguments or points of view."

In 15 years of teaching, Theresa MacPhail has adapted to the declining number of students willing and able to complete reading assignments. "She began assigning fewer readings, then fewer still," reasoning that less is more, she told McMurtrie. "She would focus on the readings that mattered most and were interesting to them."

MacPhail is an associate professor in science and technology studies at Stevens Institute of Technology, a selective university. But more and more of her students "still weren’t doing the reading, and when they were, more and more struggled to understand it." They complained about having to write a research paper. It was too hard.

Why aren't I going to go off on a rant about the stupid kids? 

We, or at least our educational system and Big Tech, did this to them. I also think this is why IQs have been dropping in recent years. 

I spend most of my time on the Internet--it is a matter of habit. I have a voracious appetite for knowledge, and it is now a job requirement for me to be constantly updated on what is going on. 

And, as I have spent more time online I have noticed a severe drop in attention span. I read more than ever, but consume information in ever smaller chunks. Bottom line it for me up front, man! 

Of course, my attention span was unusually long compared to my peers in school, at least when I was interested. I read Kant, for God's sake, although it was a slog. Hegel was a real slog, and I drifted off often enough. 

So my shortened attention span is still probably above average compared to many, but technology has changed me and not always for the better. 

Imagine kids raised on smartphones, watching TikToks, finding YouTube videos too long and only watching shorts. A book is too much for them, and an academic paper is too boring. 

Now think about this: our public education system is beyond worthless for many students. It makes them dumber, not smarter. 

Not all schools and not for all students, but for way too many. Even "college ready" students have trouble with reading and writing, and they know next to nothing. When a professor says they don't have "context," what they mean is that they know nothing. 

“I have a lot of students who think they’ve already mastered the art [of writing], and other students who’ve never been required to really try,” says Gutierrez. He blames minimal writing requirements in high school and "good grades for mediocre work" for the decline in literacy.  His students think writing 750 words is too much.

The pandemic spread grading reforms, such as "equitable grading practices," that let students turn in work late, retake tests and receive points for assignments they didn't do. "Critics argue that such an approach can backfire, because, if done poorly, it conveys to students that deadlines, homework, and effort don’t matter," writes McMurtrie. A Fordham critique argued that the practices “lower academic standards and are likely to do long-term damage to the educational equity their advocates purport to advance.”

Teresa McPhail wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education--quite sympathetically, actually--about students today. She asked her students about reading the assignments, more specifically why they don't:

Let’s cut to the chase: Most of my students are not doing much of the course reading. Increasingly frustrated by that, I decided this year to ask them why. Here are a few representative comments:

“I honestly have not read half of anything I have ever been assigned (and have maintained about a 3.2 GPA).”

“I tend to read the first short story/poem/article assigned, and then everything after that is all SparkNotes and shmoop.”

“I have read about 30 to 40 percent of the given material throughout all of college so far.”

I have no idea what shmoop is, and I am too lazy to look. I provided a link. 

Whether or not you want to blame the students is beside the point; what matters is that we are churning out students who know nothing and don't have the tools to find out. Slap a headline and a lede out there that creates a narrative and you have them buying what you are selling. 

Not every student, of course, but more than enough to erode our society's foundations.