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College freshmen are arriving on campuses increasingly unprepared for the basic demands of higher education, with many unable to complete even modest reading assignments.

University-level literature and writing instructor Tyler Jagt highlighted the crisis in a recent essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education, describing how none of his students could finish a 20-page article—an assignment he had tackled without issue as an undergraduate just a decade earlier.

One student admitted struggling because they repeatedly lost track of the paper’s main points, a challenge that appears far from isolated. Jagt points to alarming national data underscoring the trend.

The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed 12th-grade reading scores at their lowest since tracking began in 1992, with nearly one-third of students scoring below the basic level, often unable to draw general conclusions from explicitly presented text. A separate report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation revealed that about 70 percent of fourth graders—roughly two million children—cannot read proficiently.

“What I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch,” Jagt writes. “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.”

The issue is compounded by widespread reliance on generative AI tools, which many students use to summarize or bypass difficult texts, and by the constant presence of smartphones, which studies link to diminished cognitive capacity and attention even when the devices are not in active use. Jagt notes that neural pathways for sustained focus atrophy without regular practice.

“So when a student tells me they ‘kept losing track’ of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition,” he wrote. “The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it.”