The Quiet Erosion Undermining College Readiness and Leadership
Last week, we hosted a workshop for TeenSHARP families. While the session was designed for parents and students, the conversation it surfaced is one far more adults need to be engaging right now.
At the center of the discussion was a reality we can no longer sidestep: we are living through a period of declining academic stamina, shrinking scholarly depth, and growing anti-intellectualism.
This is not primarily a problem of student motivation or willpower. It is a systems problem, and it carries serious consequences for college success, leadership development, and civic life.
During the workshop, we shared a few data points that help explain what students are up against.
The average person now spends roughly seven hours a day on screens. For Gen Z, that number is closer to nine hours. A recent New York Times analysis found that modern students are on track to spend twenty-five years of their waking lives scrolling.
At the same time, reading for pleasure in the United States has fallen by roughly forty percent over the past two decades.
These trends are reshaping how young people engage with text, ideas, and complexity.
And yet, the expectations at selective colleges have not meaningfully changed. Students are still expected to read at volume, follow long arguments, write with clarity, and sustain attention across demanding coursework. What has changed is how consistently students are being prepared for those expectations.
This is where TeenSHARP’s work is often misunderstood.
When people hear “college access,” they tend to think about applications, course selection, and financial aid support. Those elements matter, but they have never been the center of our work. Since 2009, TeenSHARP has focused on developing students who can thrive at selective colleges and go on to exercise leadership in complex environments.
That requires intellectual depth at a moment when depth is becoming less common.
On the ground, we see patterns that are increasingly hard to ignore. Many students have limited access to full textbooks and instead rely on worksheets, excerpts, and short-form materials. Few are reading more than a small number of full-length books each year. Writing often shows polish without coherence and fluency without depth. These same concerns are now being raised by faculty at some of the most selective colleges.
At the same time, we see extraordinary brilliance and a real hunger for challenge among our students: a desire to be stretched, to engage big ideas, to be taken seriously as thinkers, and to do work that actually matters.
Meanwhile, across the education sector, we see a growing tendency toward the McDonaldization of college and career preparation—the belief that readiness can be produced through scalable quick fixes, shortcuts, or transactional solutions.
But our society does not just need students who can graduate high school, gain admission to college, or secure employment. We need people who can grapple with nuance, sit with ambiguity, and sift through the flood of information coming at them each day—distinguishing high-quality ideas from low-quality ones, evidence from noise, and truth from misinformation.
At TeenSHARP, that means our work cannot stop at college awareness or career exposure. We have to help students and families build systems that allow them to go deeper.
In practice, that is what we focused on in our recent workshop. We worked with families on how to intentionally rebuild academic stamina at home through sustained reading, consistent writing practice, and routines that protect attention in an environment saturated with screens, social media, and emerging technologies. Not as enrichment, and not as punishment, but as preparation for the realities students will face in selective academic environments and beyond.
If we care about equity, leadership, and long-term success, we have to look beyond surface-level outcomes and confront the quieter erosion happening underneath them. A sustained retreat from rigor, reading, and scholarship will not show up immediately in headlines, but it will shape who is prepared to lead, solve problems, and make meaning in an increasingly complex world.
That is the work TeenSHARP is doing—and why it matters now.
