Nearly half of college-aged people don’t read for pleasure

Emily Richardson, Staff Writer

College-aged people read for pleasure less than any other age group, according to a study from the National Endowment for the Arts. 

The NEA’s study found that 48.2% of 18 to 24-year-olds identified themselves as non-readers. Among those that do read, 30.4% identified as digital or audio-only readers.

The obvious competitor to reading is social media, according to Lou Friedmann, content strategist at Pangobooks, a platform for buying and selling second-hand books.

The platform hosts about a million users, most of which were self-selected by Pangobooks from online communities about reading, such as specific SubReddits and “BookTok.” The majority of users on the platform are in the 18 to 29-year-old age bracket, but tend to have a particularly special interest in reading, Friedmann said.

“An enormous chunk of the time that students are spending when they’re not having to do homework or their own thing, they’re on their phones,” Friedmann said. “You have the whole season of a show on your phone. Why would you read a book?”

The VCU Student Literary Association started last year as a place for students who enjoy reading or would like to read more to come together, according to SLA secretary Ashley Baldwin. The group has already grown to nearly 400 members, Baldwin said.

“This book club focuses more so on stuff that’s typically overlooked,” Baldwin said. “There’s fantasy, women’s fiction, romance, just to get more people into reading again.”

The SLA votes on genres and books to read as a group and hosts events like reading in the park and an annual gala, Baldwin said. 

Baldwin enjoyed reading when they were younger but gradually fell out of the habit as they got older. Joining SLA helped them return to their old hobby, Baldwin said.

“A big part of the reason it had declined so much for me is just because of social media and the instant feedback,” Baldwin said. “It lowers your attention span. You have to train yourself back into being able to focus.”

Baldwin has read 50 books so far this year. Reading in their free time helps with emotional regulation and thinking, they said.

“I’m able to think a little bit more slowly and clearly, and I don’t get as frustrated with stuff either just because my attention span is way, way better,” Baldwin said. “I used to be a TikTok baby, three-second video type thing, but now I can sit still reading for an hour or two.”

An informal survey by The Commonwealth Times found that 82% of 67 survey participants read in their free time. The survey was conducted through Instagram stories on Sept. 3.

Reading for pleasure also gives readers a chance to connect with people whose experiences might be the same or different from your own, according to John Glover, VCU Libraries’ humanities research librarian. 

“CGI is great, but there’s always going to be some aspects of the human experience, or the experience of animals, of all sorts of things, that you are not able to connect with other than through the imagination,” Glover said. “Words on a page can bring things directly to you, mind to mind with an author, that are hard to get any other way.”

In terms of encouraging people to read, a good place to start is to emphasize that reading is possible through a larger number of modalities than people may think, Glover said.

“Most students have spent some time on social media, they’ve been on Wikipedia, they’ve been reading on AO3,” Glover said. “They’ve been doing all sorts of stuff, right? And it’s all reading, it just doesn’t necessarily look like you’re sitting there with a 500-page novel in your hand, and that’s okay.”