Along with the hours they spend in class, many college students endure several hundred of pages of course reading per week.
This reading, coupled with the extra assignments courses may require, as well as time spent doing extracurricular activities and socializing, means that the demands of college life do not often afford students the chance to partake in one simple activity: reading for pleasure.
"I don't have time to read during the semester," sophomore Lauren Vigdor said. "If I'm not doing homework or at class or work, I'm usually out with my friends. Reading isn't really a group activity."
When surrounded by friends, solo activities like reading are less likely to occur.
"It's hard when all of your friends are in such close proximity," Vigdor said. "There are a lot of distractions here."
When not crunched for time by schoolwork or surrounded by friends in a residence hall, Vigdor's level of leisure-reading skyrockets.
"Over winter break, I think I read half a dozen books that I had been wanting to get to," she said.
Though there are no statistics available relating to the decline of leisure reading in college students, a recently published Washington Post article found that "the reading proficiency of college graduates has declined in the past decade, with no obvious explanation."
According to the article, Michael Gorman, the president of the American Library Association, found that only 31 percent of college graduates could both read a book and analyze what they just read.
The article did not mention, however, whether or not a decline in the amount of leisure reading among college students is a cause or a symptom of the decreased proficiency.
English Department Chair Lee Edelman said "it shouldn't be too surprising" that college students read less in their free time, though he added that he had no "hard evidence" that would support such a decline.
Still, Edelman believes that less leisure reading can be detrimental to a student's future. "Serious readers will always have the advantage of a wider vocabulary, a greater range of rhetorical resources and a broader insight into how to move and persuade other people," Edelman said.
Many students are in agreement that they would read outside of school if it did not take away from time devoted to academic coursework.
"It's definitely a time-crunch thing. A lot of people read more during breaks," junior Rachel Barbarisi said.
Despite being an English major, Barbarisi admitted that she does not have the time to read for pleasure during the school year.
"I regret that I don't read outside school," she said. "Depending on what classes you take, you will have a more narrow view about certain subjects. [For example], if you take a class on post-modernism, you'll know a lot more about it, but not as much as you do about, say, Romanticism. Unless you fill in those blanks with outside information, you will be at a disadvantage."
Sophomore Mark Villanueva also found that his amount of non-course-related reading declined at college. "I usually only [read for pleasure] if I'm on a plane or the T," Villanueva said. "I do so much reading for school that when I'm trying to relax, reading is the last thing I want to do."
Villanueva doesn't believe that students' lowered leisure-reading levels are problematic.
"I don't think it's a problem that students don't read, because they're doing so much to keep their minds busy that reading more [for leisure] is unnecessary," he said.
"It doesn't bother me that I don't read much for pleasure, because I've got enough to read anyway, and I'm never lacking something to keep me busy," he added.
Anne Fricker contributed to this article.
