I don’t want to dismiss this as of no concern, but this article has no numbers nor rigorous attempts to measure the reading ability of students. Its just a few professors - probably (but not necessarily) representative of a large body of professors - complaining about their students not doing their assigned reading.

I’m not sure how many I speak for on this, but this feels like this article could have been written about my college cohort (mid to late millennial). I know I barely did the reading for my gen ed courses cause I didn’t care about “History of the Near East” or “Mythology of New World Cultures”. I remember saying to myself “I’m here to learn math and engineering, not stories old folks told around a camp fire a millennium ago”. I’m not saying that’s right (in fact I now believe quite the opposite) but I would have been one of these “illiterate kids” had I been sampled in my first year of college (despite having been an avid reader my whole life).

“AI will help fix this.”

/s