Mean Reading Level of Freshman Summer Books Is Suited to 9th Graders

More than a third of four- and two-year colleges have common reading programs, or CRPs, usually as part of their first-year experiences. But what level and kinds of books are featured?

In a new study, not yet published, Jennifer R. Keup aims to find out. The selections, she says, have been “underresearched and highly criticized” — knocked most persistently by the National Association of Scholars, which has found them to be too homogenous, recent, and liberal; lacking in intellectual rigor; and dismissive of classic literature. The association’s 2017 report on the topic was titled “Beach Books.”

Keup, who directs the University of South Carolina at Columbia’s National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition, wanted to determine if those characterizations were accurate, and she presented her results last week at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, in Tampa, Fla.

The verdict? It’s complicated.

Based on a 2014 sample of nearly 250 colleges, Keup found that CRP selections are generally below college level in reading difficulty but at or above college level in terms of their thematic complexity, their length, and their multicultural, sometimes multinational, scope. They are usually nonfiction and quite recent. They tend not to have film or television adaptations. And their No. 1 emphasis is specific populations: for instance, African-Americans or other ethnicities, people who are LGBTQ, people with disabilities, or college students themselves.

Topically, in the year studied, they trended toward matters involving youth and families, science and technology, women and gender, society and sociology, medicine and health, and history.

Those trends make sense, said Keup in a phone interview from Tampa, if one considers colleges’ intent. They want books that are accessible to a broad range of incoming first-year students but that also challenge them to look beyond the confines of their own experiences. Colleges seek books that consider a web of complex themes representative of college-level work but that are also timely, compelling, perhaps provocative.

The reading level in the sample was sometimes “below what you would hope,” Keup said, “but there’s an issue of accessibility. It’s summer reading.” And at page counts averaging around 300, they demand of students “a substantial amount of time and energy.” Among interesting outliers: The Shawl, by Cynthia Ozick, is only 69 pages, while Christianity, by Diarmaid MacCulloch, weighs in at a daunting 1,184 pages.

A ‘Mixed Picture’

Keup and her team worked from sales data from six publishers of the most popular common-reading titles for the summer and fall of 2014. The team analyzed 264 book selections from 245 institutions, using a standard test of reading level; information from IMDB.com about the availability of film and TV adaptations; and content information from library, sales, and other databases. The availability of a screen adaptation was measured to gauge the possibility of students’ viewing that instead of reading the book.

Of the 264, 184 were nonfiction — mostly general nonfiction, but also (64 programs) autobiographies, biographies, or memoirs. Fiction represented 79 of the selections, including general fiction (63), graphic novels (nine), and collections of short stories (seven). Only one was poetry.

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Forty-five percent of all selections had been published within the last five years, and more than 90 percent had come out since 2000. The oldest was from 1968. Only 24 had a film or TV adaptation available in 2014. More than a third of the books were “foreign, international, or global.”

The sample’s mean had a reading level equal to midway through the first year of high school, although 30 percent of the selections were at a middle-school level. On the fringes were 13 percent at elementary-school level and 14 percent at college level.

In sum, Keup found, the National Association of Scholars is correct that the average reading level of the selections is low, but “contextual scope/setting, genre, page count, and subject complexity provide a more nuanced and mixed picture.”

She writes that “the current data did not include any measure of the sociopolitical leaning, so it was not possible to test the criticism that CRP titles may be advancing a particular partisan agenda. However, it is clear that they are communicating more modern ideas, content, and sensibilities.”

Keup’s center has completed a report, not yet published, on how common readings are incorporated into first-year course work. She would also like to study whether classics — for instance, books by Jane Austen, Mark Twain, and John Dewey — really do differ in rigor from the books now being assigned.

The National Association of Scholars, in its 2017 report, urged that book choices for “common-reading programs … be shifted from the ‘cocurricular’ bureaucracy to the faculty.” Keup would like to look more closely at how colleges pick the books.

Alexander C. Kafka is a Chronicle senior editor. Follow him on Twitter @AlexanderKafka, or email him at alexander.kafka@chronicle.com.