The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school, Rose Horowitch wrote in the November 2024 issue.

I’m an English teacher at a private college-preparatory school, and much of “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” sounded familiar. My students, too, now struggle to read long texts. Unaddressed in this apt article, though, are changes to the broader high-school context in which reading for homework now occurs. Today, students with elite college aspirations have extracurricular schedules that demand as much—if not more—time than school itself. These commitments are necessary, in their eyes, to gain admission to selective institutions. As a result, teachers face considerable pressure from not only students but also parents and school administrators to limit homework time—no matter if the assignment is a calculus problem set or Pride and Prejudice. In combination with considerably slower rates of reading and diminished reading comprehension, curtailed homework time means that an English teacher might not be able to assign more than 10 to 15 pages of relatively easy prose per class meeting, a rate so excruciatingly slow, it diminishes one’s ability to actually grasp a novel’s meaning and structure. I see how anxious and drained my students are, but I think it’s important for them to experience what can grow from immersive reading and sustained written thought. If we want students to read books, we have to be willing to prioritize the time for them to do so.

Anna Clark
San Diego, Calif.

As a professor, I agree with my colleagues who have noticed the declining literacy of American students at elite universities.

However, I am not sure if the schools are entirely to blame. In American universities, selection is carried out by admissions offices with little interest in the qualities that faculty might consider desirable in a college student. If faculty members were polled—something that has never happened to me in my 20-year career—I’m sure we would rank interest and experience in reading books quite highly.

Admissions decisions in the United States are based on some qualities that, however admirable, have little or nothing to do with academic aptitude. In contrast, at Oxford and Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, undergraduate admissions are typically conducted by the same academics who will teach those students. Most personal statements primarily consist of a discussion of which books the student has read and what they learned from them. Students are then expected to discuss these books in more detail in an interview. When considered alongside the undergraduate selection process, the decline in literacy among American undergraduates is totally understandable.

Ione Fine
Psychology Professor, University of Washington
Seattle, Wash.

Having taught English in a public school for 32 years, I am not surprised that colleges and universities are discovering that incoming students lack the skill, focus, and endurance to read novels. Throughout my career, primarily teaching ninth graders, I fostered student readership not by assigning novels for the whole class to read, but rather by allowing students to select young-adult books that they would read independently in class. Thousands of lifelong readers were created as a result.

Ten years ago, however, my district administration told me that I could no longer use class time for independent student reading. Instead, I was to focus on teaching skills and content that the district believed would improve standardized-test scores. Ironically, research showed that the students who read more books scored significantly better than their classmates on standardized reading tests.

I knew that many students were unlikely to read at home. So I doubled down: I found time for students to read during the school day and repurposed class time to allow my students to share their ideas; to question, respond, and react along with their peers. The method was so successful that the district adopted my approach for seventh through ninth grade, and I published a university-level textbook preparing teachers to create similar communities of readers in their own classrooms.

Whole-class novels just aren’t working: Some students will always be uninterested in a teacher’s choice, and perceive the classics as irrelevant and difficult to comprehend. But allowing students to select their books can help them fall in love with reading.

Michael Anthony
Reading, Pa.

I am an educator of 16 years living in New Hampshire. “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” reflects a lot of what I’ve seen recently. But a large piece of the puzzle is public-school budgets. A major reason novels have been removed from curricula is money: Many districts cannot afford to purchase a book for every student, especially in the upper grades. Typically, districts will buy a “class set” of novels, about 20 to 30 books—that’s it. The books must be used during the English blocks for instruction and reading time. There are not enough books for students to take home and read; if they are reading them only in their class block, a novel will take months and months to finish. I knew of one district that would have teachers make copies of entire novels to share with their students; they’d take turns on copy duty to pull it off. I wish I could teach more complete novels, because students love it. But districts need budgets large enough to buy books for everyone.

Meaghan Kelly
Rumney, N.H.

When teaching my college history courses, I have polled my students to see how many have ever read a book cover to cover. Sometimes, only a few students would raise their hand.

I inquired because I always gave them the option to read a book instead of writing a 10-page research paper. They then would have a one-on-one, hour-long discussion with me about the book they’d selected. Students who chose that option generally had a good experience. But one student shines bright in my mind. In truth, I didn’t remember him well—but he stopped me at an alumni function to say thank you. He had taken my class the second semester of his senior year to fill an elective, and he had chosen to read David McCullough’s 1776. He’d devoured the book—and he’d loved our discussion. He told me that the assignment had changed his life: Up to that point, he had never read a whole book. Since that class, he has read two or three books a month, and now has hundreds of books in his own library. He assured me that he would be a reader for the rest of his life.

It was one of the most gratifying moments of my career. I hope more teachers, professors, and parents give their students a chance to learn what this student did—that books are one of the great joys in life.

Scott Salvato
Mooresville, N.C.

Rose Horowitch replies:

Anna Clark’s letter builds on an idea that I hoped to convey in the article: that the shift away from reading full books is about more than individual students, teachers, or schools. Much of the change can be understood as the consequence of a change in values. The professors I spoke with didn’t think their students were lazy; if anything, they said they were overscheduled and frazzled like never before, facing immense pressure to devote their time to activities that will further their career. Under these circumstances, it can be difficult to see how reading The Iliad in its entirety is a good use of time. Acknowledging this reality can be disheartening, because the solution will not be as simple as changing curricula at the college, high-school, or middle-school level. (And as several of these letters note, changing curricula isn’t all that straightforward.) But letters like Scott Salvato’s are a hopeful reminder of the power of a good—full—book to inspire a student to become a lifelong reader.

The Atlantic Behind the Cover

In this month’s cover story, “How the Ivy League Broke America,” David Brooks describes the failure of the United States’ meritocracy, created in part by James Conant, the influential president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953. Conant and like-minded reformers had hoped to overturn America’s “hereditary aristocracy of wealth”; instead, they helped create a new ruling class—the so-called cognitive elite, selected and credentialed by the nation’s top universities. For our cover image, the artist Danielle Del Plato placed the story’s headline on pennants she created for each of the eight Ivy League schools, which have been instrumental in shaping and perpetuating America’s meritocracy.

— Paul Spella, Senior Art Director

Corrections

Due to an editing error, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” (November) misstated the year Nicholas Dames started teaching Literature Humanities. He began teaching the course in 1998, not 1988. “What Zoya Sees” (November) misstated where in Nigeria Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi and her husband, Sunny, have a home. Their home is in Ngwo, not Igwo.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

Every presidential election appears to pose one big question—who will win?—that is in fact made up of countless smaller questions: How do voters really behave? Which old rules of politics still apply, and which are obsolete? What kind of country do we live in? In 2016, we learned that white evangelical voters would overwhelmingly support a louche serial philanderer. Four years later, we learned that Florida had shifted from the quintessential swing state to a Republican stronghold. Here are five of the biggest outstanding questions heading into next week’s vote.

Will the polls finally be right?

Donald Trump’s stunning 2016 victory set off a reckoning among pollsters to figure out how they had gotten things so wrong. Then 2020 came around, and they somehow did even worse. Polling averages showed Joe Biden leading in Wisconsin, for example, by 10 points; he won the state by just half a point.

Pollsters have offered various overlapping explanations for their errors last time. Republicans seem to have been less likely to respond to surveys, because of a deep mistrust in institutions, which left them underrepresented in the results. And Democrats may have been more likely to respond, because they were more likely to be sheltering in place during COVID. Whatever the precise mechanism, the 2020 polls clearly underestimated support for Trump.  

[Gilad Edelman: The asterisk on Kamala Harris’s poll numbers]

In 2024, pollsters have been deploying a range of techniques to prevent that from happening again. One common approach: asking people whom they voted for in 2020 to ensure that surveys include enough Trump 2020 supporters. Such techniques, however, can introduce problems of their own. Voters are bad at recalling past votes, and tend to say that they voted for the winner of the previous election even if they didn’t. This raises the possibility, however remote, that polls are overestimating Trump’s support this time around.

Will we finally see a youth gender gap?

In an electorate deeply divided by race, class, geography, and education, gender has long been an exception. Since the 1980s, men have been slightly more likely to vote Republican and women to vote Democratic, but the gap has remained small and stable. Among young voters, it has hardly existed at all; young people have skewed overwhelmingly Democratic regardless of gender. In 2020, 68 percent of 18-to-29-year-old men voted for Joe Biden compared with 70 percent of women in that age cohort. That was the same percentage gap as in 2008.

If the polls are to be believed, that pattern has radically changed this year. Across three recent New York Times/Siena polls, young women still support Democrats at about the same rate as they did in 2020, with 67 percent in favor of Kamala Harris. But young male support for Democrats has plummeted to just 37 percent. In swing states, the gap appears to be even larger.

What makes this shift especially strange is that its sudden timing rules out many of the most common explanations offered for it. The backlash to #MeToo, Trump’s hypermasculine appeal, changing gender roles, and the rise of an anti-establishment male online subculture have been many years in the making, and yet the youth gender-voting divide didn’t show up in 2018, 2020, or 2022. Why it might be showing up now remains a mystery. (It also doesn’t seem to be about the gender of the Democratic candidate; Joe Biden was polling just as poorly with young men as Harris is.)

[Rose Horowitch: Are Gen Z men and women really drifting apart?]

The possibility remains that the divide is an artifact of polling that will not extend to the voting booth. Trump’s youth support is concentrated among those who are least likely to actually vote. According to the most recent Harvard Youth Poll, young men who “definitely” plan to vote favor Harris 55 to 38 percent. Young men might say they prefer Trump, but whether they will act on that preference is a different story.

Are Democrats losing Black and Hispanic support?

The American electorate has long been sharply divided on racial lines. Since the 1960s, white voters have mostly voted Republican and nonwhite voters have overwhelmingly voted Democrat. In 2020, Joe Biden won 92 percent of Black voters and 63 percent of Hispanic voters. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama performed similarly among those groups.

Four years later, Trump’s rhetoric toward nonwhite Americans and immigrants has become even more nakedly hateful, while Democrats have nominated a Black woman for president. And yet, according to a recent New York Times/Siena poll of the Black and Hispanic electorate, Harris is winning just 78 percent of Black voters and 56 percent of Hispanic voters. If those numbers hold on Election Day, Trump is on track to win a greater share of Hispanic voters than any other Republican candidate in two decades and a greater share of Black voters than any other Republican candidate since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

How can this be? One possibility is that economic concerns are overwhelming racial ones. Black and Hispanic voters have long been more likely than white voters to say the economy is their top issue, and right now the country’s economic mood is dismal. The same Times/Siena poll found that just 20 percent of Hispanic voters and 26 percent of Black voters say current economic conditions are good or excellent.

Another possibility is that the same forces that first caused white voters without a college degree to swing toward Trump in 2016 are now causing nonwhite voters to do the same. Many Black and Hispanic voters agree with Trump on issues such as immigration and crime: The Times/Siena poll found that 45 percent of Hispanic voters and 41 percent of Black voters support deporting undocumented immigrants, and about half the voters in each group say that crime in big cities is a major problem that has gotten out of control. And both groups have become disillusioned with the Democrats. The poll found that just 76 percent of Black voters and 56 percent of Hispanic voters see them as “the party of the working class,” while only six in 10 Black voters and fewer than half of Hispanics say that the Democratic Party “keeps its promises” more than Republicans.

[Read: How Trump is dividing minority voters]

Either way, a shift of this magnitude would overturn two interrelated assumptions that have dominated the thinking of both major parties for decades: first, that voters of color predictably vote according to their racial identities, and second, that as the U.S. continues to become a more racially diverse country, the electorate will automatically tilt in favor of the Democrats. A political system in which nonwhite voters are truly up for grabs has the potential to reshape the strategies of both parties and transform the electoral map.

Does the economy matter?

Historically, the state of the economy has been a pretty good predictor of who will win the presidency. An analysis by the political scientists John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck found that despite all the abnormalities of 2020—a pandemic, national protests, a uniquely polarizing president—models that factored in both economic fundamentals and consumer sentiment predicted the result and margin of that year’s presidential election more accurately than the polls did.

That should be good news for Harris. By most objective standards, the U.S. economy is performing remarkably well: Growth is up, unemployment is low, real wages are rising, and inflation has been tamed.

Except the voters seem to disagree. Despite a stretch of fantastic economic news—including interest-rate cuts, low inflation, plunging gas prices, and continued job growth—consumer sentiment remains well below where it was as recently as April of this year and at about the same level as it was in October 2009, when the economy was in freefall and the unemployment rate reached more than 10 percent. Even as the economy has improved in almost every possible way, voters don’t seem any happier with it. Many Americans are still outraged by the higher cost of goods, particularly groceries, relative to pre-pandemic prices. And, like voters around the world, they seem likely to take that frustration out on the incumbent party.

[Annie Lowrey: The worst best economy ever]

But here’s a further twist: Polls also show Harris’s standing improving along the specific dimension of economic issues. Every month this election cycle, the polling firm Echelon Insights has asked voters which candidate would make the economy work better. In June, voters favored Trump over Biden by 11 points; in September, they favored Harris over Trump by one point. That might help explain why Harris is doing better in the polls than Biden did, but it doesn’t explain the fact that Trump has been gaining ground in recent weeks to pull dead even with the vice president, even in some national polls. The relationship between the economy and voting behavior in the 2024 election appears to be anything but straightforward.

Do campaigns make a difference?

The core of every campaign is what’s known as the “ground game”: each side’s effort to canvass neighborhoods, knock on doors, and make phone calls in an attempt to turn out its supporters come Election Day.

But the ground game has been a remarkably poor predictor of success in recent elections. In 2016, Trump’s field operation was almost nonexistent, whereas the Hillary Clinton campaign oversaw a voter-outreach juggernaut. Trump won. In 2020, the Trump campaign boasted that its massive field operation knocked on a million doors every week, while the Biden campaign conducted almost no in-person canvassing because of worries about spreading COVID. Biden won.

Still, political-science research has consistently found—and common sense strongly suggests—that nudging potential voters to vote does, in fact, increase turnout. According to estimates by the political scientists Alan Gerber and Donald Green, a canvassing effort that gets a response at 1,000 doors generates about 40 new voters, and a phone bank that reaches 1,000 people produces approximately 28 new voters. Given that the 2024 presidential race could very well be decided by tens of thousands of votes in a few key states, these kinds of numbers could be enough to swing the outcome.  

So who has the better ground game this time around? By just about every conventional indicator, the answer is Kamala Harris. The Trump campaign claims to have “hundreds of paid staff”; the Harris campaign has 375 in Pennsylvania alone, and about 2,500 in total. During just one week in October, the Harris campaign says its volunteers knocked on 1.6 million doors and made 20 million phone calls. (Trump’s team has chosen not to release these kinds of details.)  

The disparity is partly a product of an imbalance in resources. The Harris campaign has raised more than $1 billion in the past three months, more than double the Trump campaign’s haul during the same period. The Harris campaign accordingly outspent the Trump campaign by more than three to one in September alone. (Making matters worse for Trump, his campaign has spent a large chunk of its war chest paying off his legal bills and funding efforts to monitor “election integrity.”)

The Trump campaign says it can make up for its lackluster on-the-ground numbers by relying on unconventional tactics, such as hyper-targeting “low-propensity voters” who support Trump but didn’t show up in 2020. It is also relying heavily on well-resourced but unproven outside organizations funded by conservative donors to get out the vote.

Judging by the past two elections, odds are that Trump’s lack of a ground game won’t be decisive. But in an election in which almost every single swing-state vote might count, it certainly isn’t doing him any favors.