Professors are describing a surge in incoming students’ inability to complete assigned reading at prior expectations, with some reporting students who struggle to read even a single sentence. Pepperdine humanities professor Jessica Hooten Wilson told reporters that the issue is less about critical thinking and more about sentence-level comprehension. The problem is prompting changes in pedagogy at selective institutions, including returning to texts line-by-line and reading passages aloud together. The reporting also links the shift to broader national reading declines and indicates that faculty are adjusting course design rather than abandoning academic goals. For higher education administrators, the immediate impact is operational: redesigning general education and first-year seminars, reconsidering assessment models, and ensuring enough instructional support so reading remediation doesn’t become a persistent quality gap.