Are books dead? Why Gen Z doesn't read

Even academically inclined teens aren't turning the pages anymore. That doesn't bode well.

Earlier this year, a college professor writing at Slate lamented that his students had begun to struggle with reading. While he once routinely assigned 30 pages of reading a class, “Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding,” he wrote. I have heard similar stories from my fellow faculty members around the country, who say that students complain about reading anything longer than a few pages.

Perhaps we’re just getting old, our perceptions are off, or maybe teens have never read all that much. Or perhaps this is a pandemic deficit that will soon fade. Fortunately, due to my favorite big national survey of teens, there’s a way to find out.

First, let’s think about reading a little more. Reading is not natural for humans the way that speaking is. Children learn how to speak by hearing others speak. Reading is different: It must initially be taught, and then it must be practiced. For most people, the more you read, the faster you can read, and that pays off later in school and at work.

In particular, reading long-form text, including books, is necessary for success in college, graduate school, and in many jobs. It’s also useful for understanding politics, policy, and parenting. Thus, if there have been changes in reading among young people, that has implications for education, the workforce, families, and for our democracy.

Since 1976, the Monitoring the Future Survey has asked a large, nationally representative sample of American high school seniors how many books they read in the last year “just because you wanted to – that is, without their being assigned.” Thus, it’s asking about reading for pleasure outside of anything for school.

In 1976, nearly 40% of U.S. 12^th graders read 6 or more books for pleasure in the last year. By 2021-22, it was down to 13%. The number who did not read a single book for pleasure went the opposite way, from only 11.5% in 1976 to 41% in 2021-22 (see Figure 1). So in a high school classroom of 30 teens, in 1976 only about 3 would not have read a single book for pleasure. In recent years, it’s 12 – four times as many. And instead of 11 reading 6 or more books, only 4 would have.

Figure 1: Percent of U.S. 12th graders reading none or six or more books for pleasure in the last year, 1976-2022. Source: Data from Monitoring the Future complied and analyzed by Jean M. Twenge, author of Generations

The 12^th graders who most need to be reading are those who anticipate going to graduate or professional school to get a law or medical degree, a master’s degree, or a Ph.D. Lawyers need to read case filings, medical students need to read complex textbooks, academics need to read journal articles and scholarly books, and business people need to read case studies, manuals, and business books.

But even students aiming for graduate school are now reading much less. High school seniors who expect to get an advanced degree once read 8 books per year that were not assigned for school (see Figure 2). They now read a little more than 3. In addition, the gap between the most intellectually inclined students and others has narrowed: It used to be more than 2 books a year and now it’s a little more than 1. That narrowing appears to have happened mostly in the last decade.

Figure 2: Number of books read for pleasure in the last year by U.S. 12^th graders, by educational plans, 1976-2022. Source: Data from Monitoring the Future complied and analyzed by Jean M. Twenge, author of Generations

Even more stunning are the number of academically inclined students who now don’t read at all – more than 1 out of 3. It used to be exceedingly rare for a 12^th grader who planned to go to graduate school to never read for pleasure – that was true for only 7% (1 out of 14) of this group in the late 1970s. As late as 2009-10, it was 1 out of 7. By 2021-22, that number had doubled (see Figure 3). So these days in an honors class of 30 students all aiming for graduate school, 10 have not read a book not assigned for school in the last year.

Figure 3: Percent of U.S. 12^th graders who do not read for pleasure, by educational plans, 1976-2022. Source: Data from Monitoring the Future complied and analyzed by Jean M. Twenge, author of Generations

Are academically ambitious students reading less because they are spending more time on their homework? No: In the late 1970s, 43% of 12^th graders who expected to go to graduate school spent 10 or more hours a week on homework. In 2021-22, it was 38% -- less, not more. High school seniors are also spending less time hanging out with their friends in person, less time sleeping, and less time working. In surveys of entering college students since the 1980s, there have been few changes in time spent on extracurricular activities in the last year of high school. Thus, teens have considerably more leisure time at home than students in the 1970s and 1980s, not less.

So where is the time once spent reading going? Screens are the inevitable conclusion. In Figure 1, there appear to be two stages to the decline of reading: 1976-2002 and 2012-2022. The second period after 2012 is a familiar pattern – that’s also when daily social media use became common among teens, when the majority of Americans owned a smartphone, and when Facebook bought Instagram. Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram and eventually TikTok started to fill an increasing number of hours in teens’ lives – nearly 5 hours a day by 2023, according to Gallup. With social media algorithms pulling them back over and over, when would teens have time to read? As writer Matt Feeney noted, his daughters were deep into reading as middle-schoolers. “Then, after we gave them the phones they’d long been clamoring for,” he writes, “their recreational reading of books basically ended.”

The first period of the decline of reading is more of a mystery. Time spent watching TV among teens stayed about the same during this period, around 2 hours a day. One thing that did increase quite a bit during this time was gaming. Pong turned into Atari which turned into Nintendo and then X-Box. We don’t have good measures of time spent on gaming during this era, but it seems safe to conclude that it increased 1976-2002.

If gaming were the primary reason for the decline in reading 1970s-1990s, we’d expect a larger decline among boys than girls. Instead, if anything, it’s the opposite — girls’ book reading declined more in this era (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: Number of books read for pleasure by U.S. 12^th graders, by sex, 1976-2022. Source: Data from Monitoring the Future complied and analyzed by Jean M. Twenge, author of Generations

[A side note: Another mystery is the bump in reading between about 2002 and 2010. When I posted a related graph on Twitter/X, many people theorized that the increase in teen reading during those years was due to the publication of the Harry Potter books, which took place from 1997 to 2007. That’s possible. But, as Figure 4 shows, nearly all of the bump in reading was driven by girls. That makes me wonder if the uptick was also partially due to the Twilight books, which were published between 2005 and 2008, with the movies coming out between 2008 and 2010.]

Overall, the decline in reading has broad implications. Most immediately, middle school and high school teachers will have more students who rarely read. The same will be true for college faculty.

High schools may be confounding the problem. At my oldest daughter’s high school, regular English classes no longer assign books, only short stories and articles. So not only are students not reading books for pleasure, they are no longer required to read books for school. Although I can understand the challenges teachers are facing getting students to read books, the choice to not assign books is leaving many high school students unprepared for college. To take just one example, introductory psychology textbooks are commonly 800 pages long.

It’s also easier to be a better parent if you can absorb long-form text-- a good amount of expert advice on parenting comes in the form of books. Reading deeply is also important for being an informed citizen; a long-ish newspaper article is necessary to explain most policy ideas. Complex ideas are difficult to fully communicate in a text, Instagram caption, TikTok, or listicle. As a result, our politics have increasingly played to the lowest common denominator with the simplest ideas possible. The results have often not been pretty.

I think the pronounced decline in reading engenders at least three questions:

1. What does the decline in reading mean for education, the workplace, and our society?

2. Why did reading decline 1970s-1990s even before the temptations of smartphones and social media?

3. What, if anything, should we be doing about this decline?

Looking forward to reading your thoughts.