College students are reading less than ever, and it’s not by design.

The Atlantic recently delivered this uncomfortable truth to the masses in its article The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books. We literature professors have observed this issue firsthand for some time. Where books, sonnets, and plays used to be read in their entirety, skinny excerpts are now skimmed … sometimes. 

The Atlantic article discusses a variety of reasons for college students’ inability to read a novel from cover to cover. Namely, an increased focus on test scores, teacher shortages, faltering student attention spans and disrupted learning outcomes during the pandemic in high school are contributing to the problem. As a result, when students make it to college, they are reading less; they are unable to muster enough focus to get through Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, let alone Bram Stoker’s denser Dracula. 

Since the pandemic, we’ve seen that academic progress has slowed nationally. In Nevada, we’ve experienced a significant decline in reading comprehension and math proficiency. Anecdotally, in the five years that I’ve been teaching literature and composition courses since COVID, more students tell me that they struggle with reading comprehension or that they don’t even particularly care to read, even though they’re pursuing a college degree.  

This is where summer bridge programs can help turn the tide. Summer bridge programs typically provide academic courses to incoming college freshmen so that they can acclimate to the campus environment. These programs feature a menu of core classes, college-navigation tutorials and goal-setting workshops. I’ve seen their incredible potential firsthand.

The magic at the core of any summer bridge is its ability to blend the academic with the social. Imagine a lively debate about Dr. Frankenstein’s ethics followed by a pizza party. As a result, students begin to connect with one another, build camaraderie and feel less lonely as they embark on their college journey. 

Unfortunately, loneliness negatively impacts learning. Since 64.7 percent of 1,100 college students surveyed in 2023 indicated that they increasingly feel isolated, college educators can attest to the fact that we are in a loneliness epidemic resulting in increased mental health distress. And we know that mental health issues and social isolation contribute to poorer academic performance.

At Nevada State University, we aimed to address loneliness and waning interest in academics through the Nepantla Summer Bridge Program. Twelve years ago, I co-founded the Nepantla Summer Bridge Program to help incoming, first-generation college students better acclimate to life at college. I learned that there is an increasing urgency and need for programs such as these to combat classroom disengagement and student isolation after the pandemic. 

This past summer, 20 freshmen and I spent two hours together every day for six weeks reading and discussing challenging postcolonial works. I shocked my students by opening our class with Edward Said’s Orientalism, which isn’t your average freshman reading fare. And while we deliberately read an abbreviated excerpt, a point The Atlantic article might chide, it was a challenging selection that gave students the theoretical framework to write their first argumentative paper. We dissected the excerpt slowly, line by line, and closely read Said’s eloquent points about the nature of exploitative power dynamics between the European colonizer and those they colonized in the Middle East and North Africa. 

At the start of the week, students reported on average that they only understood 5 percent to 10 percent of the reading, but by the end of the week (after having worked through Said for more than eight hours together), students reported that they had increased their understanding to 80 percent. This figure grew even higher by the end of our six weeks together. Their stronger grasp of the content became clear in their first essay wherein they had to use Said’s theoretical framework to argue why an image of their choosing was orientalist. 

Throughout the term, we had thoughtful discussions and projects that suggested deeper analysis of works they may have either overlooked, skimmed or skipped at the high school level. As an educator, I have learned in this summer bridge program that we can not only help students find their way back to reading, but that we can help them cultivate a love for tackling challenging material as well.

In an internal data study, we found that 85 percent of students who participated in the Nepantla program completed their first year of college in its entirety, compared to only 74 percent of the non-Nepantla students. GPAs were higher as well, averaging about 3.12 cumulative compared to non-Nepantla, first-time freshmen who averaged about a 2.92 GPA. Beyond these top-level metrics, students were also given the time and space to confront their anxieties about foundational reading and writing skills, which helped improve their reasoning and reading skills. 

As the Nevada legislative session gets underway, the Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE) must be proactive in implementing strategies that can boost student investment in course material and engagement in the classroom. But, most importantly, we have to get students reading again. 

Legislators can allocate more financial resources to NSHE institutions and programming such as summer bridge programs, which are dedicated to improving core reading and arithmetic skills. College and university presidents meanwhile should take initiative and prioritize the funding and creation of academic summer bridge programs that can help transition students back to in-person learning. This is especially critical for mitigating issues stemming from the pandemic, namely: decreased student enrollment, diminishing foundational skills and increased isolation from their peer group. 

We summer bridge professionals are ready to do this work because we know these programs are effective. The loss of student foundational skills is a real problem that we need to collectively and urgently address. Administrators and legislators, the ball’s in your court. 

Leila Pazargadi is a professor of English at Nevada State University where she co-founded the Nepantla Program in 2012. She is also a co-leader of the Scholars Strategy Network in Nevada.

The Nevada Independent welcomes informed, cogent rebuttals to opinion pieces such as this. Send them to [email protected].