5 ms·

Over half of American adults can't read at 6th Grade Levels

40 points by laurex 8mo ago

andsoitis 8mo ago
can they think critically?
- cityzen 8mo ago
  No
bearjaws 8mo ago
Did a two year stint in education (9th through 12th grade) ~27k students, working in LMS software (Moodle). The state of affairs is... desperate. They allow unlimited retries on English assignments. 20% of kids are blatantly using ChatGPT and don't bother learning basic concepts. Florida as an example has a pretty strict requirement that you must pass 11th grade English to graduate. There about 10% of students in a limbo where they are now in 12th grade about to graduate, and they are forced to take out of school education to try and pass the 11th grade final exam. It's become an entire business model of some smaller education providers. "English 3" as its called is pretty foundational, arguments, research, speeches, MLA and sourcing material. It's not just Shakespeare, it's critical thinking (oh god I sound like ChatGPT). Unfortunately the "service class" will swell to an unfathomable size, with people who will lack any and all ability to learn. How are even the blue collar jobs supposed to be staffed if you can't read the HVAC manual.
- OgsyedIE 8mo ago
  This strikes me as a passive way of looking at it when the predominant situation is that administrators actively implement lower standards.
- netsharc 8mo ago
  Would be cuter if the HVAC manual is in Chinese... I wonder what the literacy level in China is like (% who can read at grade 5, 6, 12, etc, level)
khelavastr 8mo ago
Surprised more student activists aren't strongly protesting administrators who let teachers pass them without knowing what they need.
- constantcrying 8mo ago
  In my experience of University much of student activism was done by students who struggled the most academically and often made it part of their agenda to ease academic standards.
  - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
    You had an outlier experience, unfortunately. I went to a state school, and most of even my student government class wound up prominently in the Congress or White House.
    - constantcrying 8mo ago
      Why do you think that it is a given that politicians perform better in school? Here in Germany many prominent politicians were academic failures or dropouts. We had student council elections, where the candidates were listed by degree and the semester, the trend was overwhelmingly that the candidates were in semesters after the usual graduation date, often having studied for more then 5 years.
      - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
        > Why do you think that it is a given that politicians perform better in school? Non sequitur? Where was this even remotely claimed?
        constantcrying 8mo ago
        I said that student activists struggled academically, your counter point was that at your school student activists made it into high political offices. What other interpretation of your words could there be except you believing that people in high political offices are above average students.
OGEnthusiast 8mo ago
Really feels like the bottom ~70% of America is about to become a permanent underclass.
- AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
  What metric would you use to define underclass that doesn’t already apply?
  - kelseyfrog 8mo ago
    Permanent is the more potent idea being conveyed. Loads of places have an underclass, but the idea that the opportunity to escape it and be condemned to a permanent social-economic station is contrary to the American myth.
    - AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
      I think 7% intergenerational poverty, primarily in the black community due to redlining and racist laws, covers it pretty well. https://ballardbrief.byu.edu/issue-briefs/intergenerational-poverty-in-the-us-83scy https://ballardbrief.byu.edu/issue-briefs/intergenerational-...
- barbarr 8mo ago
  This is already the case
- JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
  Phone use has taken us 80% of the way there. It’s wild how correlated kids with phones (and teens with social media) is to parents’ income.
  - AnimalMuppet 8mo ago
    Could you expand on that? I could see rich kids using phones more. Or I could see poor kids using phones more, as an escape. Which way is the correlation?
ticulatedspline 8mo ago
> Nearly half of all Americans didn’t read a single book in 2025, with the habit falling roughly 40% over the past decade I don't think this is a great metric of literacy. For one not all books are exactly high quality, and now more than ever there's a plethora of non-book written content available to us. I used to read a lot of books when I was in school but these days I rarely do, however I probably consume more written word than ever. News, blogs, documentation, various and sundry articles. I read a lot, just not books anymore.
- coldtea 8mo ago
  >I don't think this is a great metric of literacy That's like saying drinking water is not a great metric of hydration. >For one not all books are exactly high quality, and now more than ever there's a plethora of non-book written content available to us. Yes, I'm pretty sure those 50%+ of people who "didn't read a single book" did it to avoid all the less than high quality books, or because they were busy consuming high quality non-book written content online.
  - ticulatedspline 8mo ago
    > Yes, I'm pretty sure those 50%+ of people who "didn't read a single book" did it to avoid all the less than high quality books, You misinterpret, the implication of quality is that having read a book is not indicative of value, someone could have a high metric "I read 10 books a year" but they're all short, low quality romance novels. Whereas someone could clam "I read no books a year" but they're a grad student with no time for novels. by the "books read" metric the former would score much better and appear more literate.
    - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
      > someone could have a high metric "I read 10 books a year" but they're all short, low quality romance novels That person is still functionally literate. If they can get through a short novel, they can focus on e.g. a contract or draft law. If they’re only watching short-form content online, they may not even be able to follow long-form journalism.
add-sub-mul-div 8mo ago
This won't be a problem in the future. They won't have to read, AI will read a document and tell them what the preparer of that specific LLM wants them to think about it.
Merrill 8mo ago
With good speech to text and text to speech technologies the skills of writing and reading may become unnecessary for the bulk of the population. If the average person needs to create a critical document like a contract or a will, or to understands some important document, then it's likely that they will hire someone with the specialized skill set. What is unclear is whether specialists in STEM can dispense with reading and writing. The representation of information in STEM subjects includes many non-textual systems, such as drawings, charts, figures, diagrams of various sorts, tables, etc. While not primarily consisting of texts in a language, in many cases there are text components ranging from math symbols to full sentence captions or bullet points.
- gizajob 8mo ago
  With AI they can dispense with thinking too. And with an Optimus robot they won’t even have to go to the store or leave the lay-z-boy, raw unprocessed beef fat can just be shovelled into their unthinking and illiterate mouths every waking hour by the droid.
  - coldtea 8mo ago
    Bold of you to assume they'd still need to do actual living. Why not immediately die, and be spared all the extra effort?
    - netsharc 8mo ago
      For their votes, of course. Hah, there's a dystopian short story to be written there, where a regime says "These people who never got born would've voted for us, so we're counting their votes. We thank the voting population for the landslide victory and continued trust in us to govern them!".. Maybe we can ask the Supreme Court and the MAGA party what the plot of the story should be..
      - coldtea 8mo ago
        Well, they'll make sure they don't need votes soon enough...
replwoacause 8mo ago
I think this helps a lot to explain our current political situation.
coldtea 8mo ago
What's even worse is those who can read at about 6th Grade Level - but are college graduates and media professionals
sebastiennight 8mo ago
> Educators often describe reading as a predictor of long-term success, both academically and professionally. A JPMorgan survey of more than 100 billionaires, reading ranked as the top habit elite achievers had in common, including Bill Gates, Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey This article is not off to a great start when right away it - mentions Barack Obama in a survey of billionaires (he isn't) - conflates academic and professional success with becoming a billionaire which is an outlier outcome - links to a Yahoo News article (reporting the same story as the OP) when claiming to refer to a Fortune Magazine article (not linked; but I found it and the OP sems copypasted from it) as their source for a JP Morgan survey.
- JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
  > mentions Barack Obama in a survey of billionaires (he isn't) This is hilarious in the context of an article about falling literacy. They surveyed billionaires about “elite achievers.” Obama wasn’t surveyed, because as you point out, he isn’t a billionaire. Billionaires were surveyed about him.
  - sebastiennight 8mo ago
    Don't be snarky when you might be wrong in no less than 2 ways: 1. When they say A JPMorgan survey of more than 100 billionaires, reading ranked as the top habit elite achievers had in common They are not asking billionaires about other people ("elite achievers") they are asking the billionaires about themselves, and the writer is using another term to avoid repearing "billionaires". 2. The actual report, which I had tracked down prior to reading the message above, is here, and you can use your own literacy skills to confirm that my point (1) above is the correct understanding: https://assets.jpmprivatebank.com/content/dam/jpm-pb-aem/global/en/documents/other/2025-principal-discussions-report.pdf https://assets.jpmprivatebank.com/content/dam/jpm-pb-aem/glo... > We explored with each principal how they spend their time, what captures their interests and how they view the world across several key areas. While each principal’s experiences are unique, common priorities emerged.
    - 8mo ago
ticulatedspline 8mo ago
Ironically the National Literacy Institute is making me feel illiterate trying to parse their stats. >On average, 79% of U.S. adults nationwide are literate in 2024. >21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024. >54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level). [1] the 54% doesn't include the 21% does it? otherwise no-duh 20% are below 5th grade, 21% in fact. Which would make it 54% of the 79% who are literate? I come up with ~43% there plus 21% illiterate would be 64% of all US adults with some literacy deficiency? https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...
- JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
  > the 54% doesn't include the 21% does it? otherwise no-duh 20% are below 5th grade, 21% in fact No, not in fact. Literacy is typically defined to an age level. A third grader could be literate while an adult reading at their level is not.
- spicymaki 8mo ago
  I would love to see the sources for those statistics. I am not going to hold my breath.
- its_ubuntu 8mo ago
  [dead]
ChrisArchitect 8mo ago
Related: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259233 Most Americans didn't read many books in 2025 https://yougovamerica.substack.com/p/most-americans-didnt-read-many-books https://yougovamerica.substack.com/p/most-americans-didnt-re...
scoperesolution 8mo ago
Nobody has mentioned the dramatic increase of non-white immigrants and illegal aliens since 1985, the Reagan amnesty act, migration under the last three United States presidents. Learning to read proficiently requires participation of the child's parents to enforce good habits, etc. Do you really think these kids are even speaking english when they get home from school-- hell no, their speaking their native laguage with their parents. Import the third world, become the third world.
- JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
  > Nobody has mentioned the dramatic increase of non-white immigrants and illegal aliens since 1985 Genuine question: do we have data for native-born non-Hispanic Americans? This could be an artifact of immigration. Anecdotally, I think we have a divide driven by class-based device access (poorer kids are on their devices and social media more than rich kids and more than anyone was in the 80s).
memcg 8mo ago
Actual Title: More US students are arriving at college unprepared to read. Experts say some may want to ‘rethink’ a $100K degree and follow their interests
Ms-J 8mo ago
It is a big reason why we have total dog shit for politicians. If people can't read, they can't educate themselves.
mokarma 8mo ago
Wouldn't that force us to redefine what the 6th grade level of learning is? Meaning are grade levels static or dynamic?
geenkeuse 8mo ago
[dead]

40 points by laurex 8mo ago

andsoitis 8mo ago

can they think critically?

cityzen 8mo ago
No

bearjaws 8mo ago

Did a two year stint in education (9th through 12th grade) ~27k students, working in LMS software (Moodle). The state of affairs is... desperate. They allow unlimited retries on English assignments. 20% of kids are blatantly using ChatGPT and don't bother learning basic concepts. Florida as an example has a pretty strict requirement that you must pass 11th grade English to graduate. There about 10% of students in a limbo where they are now in 12th grade about to graduate, and they are forced to take out of school education to try and pass the 11th grade final exam. It's become an entire business model of some smaller education providers. "English 3" as its called is pretty foundational, arguments, research, speeches, MLA and sourcing material. It's not just Shakespeare, it's critical thinking (oh god I sound like ChatGPT). Unfortunately the "service class" will swell to an unfathomable size, with people who will lack any and all ability to learn. How are even the blue collar jobs supposed to be staffed if you can't read the HVAC manual.

OgsyedIE 8mo ago
This strikes me as a passive way of looking at it when the predominant situation is that administrators actively implement lower standards.
netsharc 8mo ago
Would be cuter if the HVAC manual is in Chinese... I wonder what the literacy level in China is like (% who can read at grade 5, 6, 12, etc, level)

khelavastr 8mo ago

Surprised more student activists aren't strongly protesting administrators who let teachers pass them without knowing what they need.

constantcrying 8mo ago
In my experience of University much of student activism was done by students who struggled the most academically and often made it part of their agenda to ease academic standards.
- JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
  You had an outlier experience, unfortunately. I went to a state school, and most of even my student government class wound up prominently in the Congress or White House.
  - constantcrying 8mo ago
    Why do you think that it is a given that politicians perform better in school? Here in Germany many prominent politicians were academic failures or dropouts. We had student council elections, where the candidates were listed by degree and the semester, the trend was overwhelmingly that the candidates were in semesters after the usual graduation date, often having studied for more then 5 years.
    - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
      > Why do you think that it is a given that politicians perform better in school? Non sequitur? Where was this even remotely claimed?
      - constantcrying 8mo ago
        I said that student activists struggled academically, your counter point was that at your school student activists made it into high political offices. What other interpretation of your words could there be except you believing that people in high political offices are above average students.

OGEnthusiast 8mo ago

Really feels like the bottom ~70% of America is about to become a permanent underclass.

AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
What metric would you use to define underclass that doesn’t already apply?
- kelseyfrog 8mo ago
  Permanent is the more potent idea being conveyed. Loads of places have an underclass, but the idea that the opportunity to escape it and be condemned to a permanent social-economic station is contrary to the American myth.
  - AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
    I think 7% intergenerational poverty, primarily in the black community due to redlining and racist laws, covers it pretty well. https://ballardbrief.byu.edu/issue-briefs/intergenerational-poverty-in-the-us-83scy https://ballardbrief.byu.edu/issue-briefs/intergenerational-...
barbarr 8mo ago
This is already the case
JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
Phone use has taken us 80% of the way there. It’s wild how correlated kids with phones (and teens with social media) is to parents’ income.
- AnimalMuppet 8mo ago
  Could you expand on that? I could see rich kids using phones more. Or I could see poor kids using phones more, as an escape. Which way is the correlation?

ticulatedspline 8mo ago

> Nearly half of all Americans didn’t read a single book in 2025, with the habit falling roughly 40% over the past decade I don't think this is a great metric of literacy. For one not all books are exactly high quality, and now more than ever there's a plethora of non-book written content available to us. I used to read a lot of books when I was in school but these days I rarely do, however I probably consume more written word than ever. News, blogs, documentation, various and sundry articles. I read a lot, just not books anymore.

coldtea 8mo ago
>I don't think this is a great metric of literacy That's like saying drinking water is not a great metric of hydration. >For one not all books are exactly high quality, and now more than ever there's a plethora of non-book written content available to us. Yes, I'm pretty sure those 50%+ of people who "didn't read a single book" did it to avoid all the less than high quality books, or because they were busy consuming high quality non-book written content online.
- ticulatedspline 8mo ago
  > Yes, I'm pretty sure those 50%+ of people who "didn't read a single book" did it to avoid all the less than high quality books, You misinterpret, the implication of quality is that having read a book is not indicative of value, someone could have a high metric "I read 10 books a year" but they're all short, low quality romance novels. Whereas someone could clam "I read no books a year" but they're a grad student with no time for novels. by the "books read" metric the former would score much better and appear more literate.
  - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
    > someone could have a high metric "I read 10 books a year" but they're all short, low quality romance novels That person is still functionally literate. If they can get through a short novel, they can focus on e.g. a contract or draft law. If they’re only watching short-form content online, they may not even be able to follow long-form journalism.

add-sub-mul-div 8mo ago

This won't be a problem in the future. They won't have to read, AI will read a document and tell them what the preparer of that specific LLM wants them to think about it.

Merrill 8mo ago

With good speech to text and text to speech technologies the skills of writing and reading may become unnecessary for the bulk of the population. If the average person needs to create a critical document like a contract or a will, or to understands some important document, then it's likely that they will hire someone with the specialized skill set. What is unclear is whether specialists in STEM can dispense with reading and writing. The representation of information in STEM subjects includes many non-textual systems, such as drawings, charts, figures, diagrams of various sorts, tables, etc. While not primarily consisting of texts in a language, in many cases there are text components ranging from math symbols to full sentence captions or bullet points.

gizajob 8mo ago
With AI they can dispense with thinking too. And with an Optimus robot they won’t even have to go to the store or leave the lay-z-boy, raw unprocessed beef fat can just be shovelled into their unthinking and illiterate mouths every waking hour by the droid.
- coldtea 8mo ago
  Bold of you to assume they'd still need to do actual living. Why not immediately die, and be spared all the extra effort?
  - netsharc 8mo ago
    For their votes, of course. Hah, there's a dystopian short story to be written there, where a regime says "These people who never got born would've voted for us, so we're counting their votes. We thank the voting population for the landslide victory and continued trust in us to govern them!".. Maybe we can ask the Supreme Court and the MAGA party what the plot of the story should be..
    - coldtea 8mo ago
      Well, they'll make sure they don't need votes soon enough...

replwoacause 8mo ago

I think this helps a lot to explain our current political situation.

coldtea 8mo ago

What's even worse is those who can read at about 6th Grade Level - but are college graduates and media professionals

sebastiennight 8mo ago

> Educators often describe reading as a predictor of long-term success, both academically and professionally. A JPMorgan survey of more than 100 billionaires, reading ranked as the top habit elite achievers had in common, including Bill Gates, Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey This article is not off to a great start when right away it - mentions Barack Obama in a survey of billionaires (he isn't) - conflates academic and professional success with becoming a billionaire which is an outlier outcome - links to a Yahoo News article (reporting the same story as the OP) when claiming to refer to a Fortune Magazine article (not linked; but I found it and the OP sems copypasted from it) as their source for a JP Morgan survey.

JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
> mentions Barack Obama in a survey of billionaires (he isn't) This is hilarious in the context of an article about falling literacy. They surveyed billionaires about “elite achievers.” Obama wasn’t surveyed, because as you point out, he isn’t a billionaire. Billionaires were surveyed about him.
- sebastiennight 8mo ago
  Don't be snarky when you might be wrong in no less than 2 ways: 1. When they say A JPMorgan survey of more than 100 billionaires, reading ranked as the top habit elite achievers had in common They are not asking billionaires about other people ("elite achievers") they are asking the billionaires about themselves, and the writer is using another term to avoid repearing "billionaires". 2. The actual report, which I had tracked down prior to reading the message above, is here, and you can use your own literacy skills to confirm that my point (1) above is the correct understanding: https://assets.jpmprivatebank.com/content/dam/jpm-pb-aem/global/en/documents/other/2025-principal-discussions-report.pdf https://assets.jpmprivatebank.com/content/dam/jpm-pb-aem/glo... > We explored with each principal how they spend their time, what captures their interests and how they view the world across several key areas. While each principal’s experiences are unique, common priorities emerged.
  - 8mo ago

ticulatedspline 8mo ago

Ironically the National Literacy Institute is making me feel illiterate trying to parse their stats. >On average, 79% of U.S. adults nationwide are literate in 2024. >21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024. >54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level). [1] the 54% doesn't include the 21% does it? otherwise no-duh 20% are below 5th grade, 21% in fact. Which would make it 54% of the 79% who are literate? I come up with ~43% there plus 21% illiterate would be 64% of all US adults with some literacy deficiency? https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-liter...

JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
> the 54% doesn't include the 21% does it? otherwise no-duh 20% are below 5th grade, 21% in fact No, not in fact. Literacy is typically defined to an age level. A third grader could be literate while an adult reading at their level is not.
spicymaki 8mo ago
I would love to see the sources for those statistics. I am not going to hold my breath.
its_ubuntu 8mo ago
[dead]

ChrisArchitect 8mo ago

Related: Kids Rarely Read Whole Books Anymore. Even in English Class https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259233 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259233 Most Americans didn't read many books in 2025 https://yougovamerica.substack.com/p/most-americans-didnt-read-many-books https://yougovamerica.substack.com/p/most-americans-didnt-re...

scoperesolution 8mo ago

Nobody has mentioned the dramatic increase of non-white immigrants and illegal aliens since 1985, the Reagan amnesty act, migration under the last three United States presidents. Learning to read proficiently requires participation of the child's parents to enforce good habits, etc. Do you really think these kids are even speaking english when they get home from school-- hell no, their speaking their native laguage with their parents. Import the third world, become the third world.

JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
> Nobody has mentioned the dramatic increase of non-white immigrants and illegal aliens since 1985 Genuine question: do we have data for native-born non-Hispanic Americans? This could be an artifact of immigration. Anecdotally, I think we have a divide driven by class-based device access (poorer kids are on their devices and social media more than rich kids and more than anyone was in the 80s).

memcg 8mo ago

Actual Title: More US students are arriving at college unprepared to read. Experts say some may want to ‘rethink’ a $100K degree and follow their interests

Ms-J 8mo ago

It is a big reason why we have total dog shit for politicians. If people can't read, they can't educate themselves.

mokarma 8mo ago

Wouldn't that force us to redefine what the 6th grade level of learning is? Meaning are grade levels static or dynamic?

geenkeuse 8mo ago

[dead]