Reading Scores Are in Freefall: What the Latest PISA Results Mean for College-Bound Students
The results dropped Tuesday morning and the headlines wrote themselves: American teenagers are reading worse than they have in a quarter century. The Programme for International Student Assessment — the global exam that compares 15-year-olds across 91 countries — just published its 2025 cycle, and the numbers are grim. U.S. reading scores fell 14 points since 2022, landing near their lowest level since the test began in 2000. Math scores are also among the worst on record.
But the story behind those numbers is more nuanced — and more relevant to college-bound students — than the doomsday headlines suggest.
The Headline Numbers
More than 760,000 teenagers sat for PISA in 2025, including about 4,600 American students from 144 schools. The test measures how well 15-year-olds can apply reading, math, and science skills to real-world problems — not rote memorization, but critical thinking.
Here is where the U.S. landed:
- Reading: Scores declined 14 points since 2022, equivalent to roughly six or seven months of lost learning. The share of American students reaching basic proficiency dropped to 74%.
- Math: Down 15 points since 2018 — half a year of schooling lost. Only 8% of American teenagers scored at the highest proficiency level, compared to 37% in Singapore and 23% in Korea.
- Science: The one bright spot. U.S. students held steady, scoring above the OECD average alongside Switzerland and Finland.
- Computational Problem Solving: A new section in 2025, testing digital-age reasoning. U.S. students scored significantly above the OECD average here.
The U.S. now ranks above average in reading and science among the 38 OECD member countries, and roughly middle of the pack in math. Not catastrophic — but the trajectory is what should concern anyone thinking about college readiness.
The Global Picture: It Is Not Just Us
Before parents spiral into panic, some critical context: this is a worldwide phenomenon. Reading scores have been falling across industrialized nations since their peak in 2012. Math scores are down globally since 2018. The pandemic accelerated the trend, but the decline started before COVID.
Reading scores fell by an average of 28 points across OECD countries between 2015 and 2025. The share of “hasty readers” — students who skim texts and give incorrect answers — nearly doubled from 2018 to 2025. Countries like Germany, Finland, and Iceland saw steeper drops than the United States.
The U.S. actually moved up in the relative rankings, not because American students improved, but because other countries deteriorated faster. As Chalkbeat reported, this has been true for decades: America’s math scores, once a national embarrassment, are now roughly average among developed nations.
“An ongoing global decline, and it seems like the pandemic has a long, long tail,” said Tracey Burns, chief of global strategy and research at the National Center on Education and the Economy.
Who Is Still Winning — and How
Singapore dominated every category. The Chinese provinces of Shanghai, Beijing, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang posted the highest math scores — 54% of their students scored at the top level — though skeptics note these are China’s wealthiest coastal regions, not a representative national sample.
Japan, Korea, Estonia, and the United Kingdom rounded out the top performers. What do these systems have in common?
- They invest in teachers over class size. As Andreas Schleicher, who oversees PISA for the OECD, pointed out: “In the U.S. if you make a choice between a better teacher and a smaller class, you typically choose a smaller class. In these countries, they save on class size, but they get the best people to become teachers.”
- They use AI differently. In top Asian countries, AI is primarily a teacher tool — used to make students think harder, work harder. In the West, it is often deployed to make things easier for students.
- They lift their weakest students. The most successful Asian systems do a far better job of bringing disadvantaged students up to proficiency, often by sending their best principals and teachers to the most challenged schools.
The Inequality Surprise
One counterintuitive finding: the achievement gap between rich and poor students actually narrowed between 2022 and 2025. But before anyone celebrates equity progress, the reason is sobering. The gap closed not because disadvantaged students improved, but because advantaged students declined faster.
In reading, students from wealthy families dropped 20 points. Disadvantaged students dropped just 4 points. In math, advantaged students fell 14 points while disadvantaged students held roughly steady.
This is not a closing of the gap from the bottom up. It is a levelling down from the top.
Why This Matters for College Admissions
If you are a student (or parent) focused on getting into a top-20 university, the PISA results carry a specific message: the reading and reasoning skills that elite colleges demand are exactly the skills that are eroding fastest.
Consider what selective admissions actually test. The SAT’s Evidence-Based Reading and Writing section. The analytical reasoning embedded in AP exams. The critical thinking that distinguishes a compelling Common App essay from a formulaic one. The ability to synthesize information across sources — a skill PISA specifically measures and found declining.
Here is the uncomfortable math: if the average American 15-year-old has lost six to seven months of reading proficiency, and the students most likely to apply to selective colleges are the ones whose scores dropped the most (the advantaged cohort fell 20 points in reading), then the pipeline of students who can handle rigorous college-level work is narrowing.
Margaret Spellings, a former U.S. education secretary, put it bluntly: “Our kids are going in the wrong direction on the skills that are absolutely essential for their — and our — success.”
The Screen Time Connection
Researchers across multiple countries point to the same culprit: technology. Not technology in the classroom, necessarily, but the constant pull of phones, social media, and now AI on teenage attention.
The data is stark. Students are reading less for pleasure than at any point measured. The share of students who read only when required has climbed steadily. And the rise of “hasty readers” — students who skim rather than engage deeply with text — tracks almost perfectly with smartphone adoption curves.
This is not a moral panic about screens. It is a measurable erosion of the sustained attention that deep reading requires. A student who cannot sit with a complex passage for ten minutes will struggle on the SAT, in a college seminar, and in a career that demands critical analysis.
What Students Can Actually Do
The macro trends are sobering, but individual students are not powerless. Here is what the data suggests matters most:
1. Read for pleasure — seriously. The single strongest predictor of reading proficiency across all PISA countries was whether students read for enjoyment. Not assigned reading. Chosen reading. Books, long-form journalism, anything that requires sustained engagement with text.
2. Practice analytical reasoning, not just test prep. PISA measures applied problem-solving, not memorization. Students who can evaluate sources, identify bias, and construct arguments from evidence will stand out — on the SAT, in essays, and in interviews.
3. Be intentional about AI use. The top-performing countries use AI as a tool to deepen learning, not shortcut it. If you are using ChatGPT to write your essays or summarize your readings, you are outsourcing exactly the cognitive muscle that colleges (and employers) value most.
4. Don’t panic about rankings. The U.S. moved up in relative standing. American students still outperform the OECD average in reading and science. The sky is not falling — but the foundation is cracking, and students who actively build their reading and reasoning skills will have a genuine competitive advantage.
The Bigger Question
Kevin Huffman, a former Tennessee education commissioner, captured the stakes: “Nobody is off the hook.” With the federal government shrinking the Department of Education and slashing staffing at the agency that administers PISA, the responsibility for improvement is falling entirely on states and districts.
For college-bound students and their families, the takeaway is clear. The skills that selective colleges value — deep reading, critical analysis, sustained attention — are becoming rarer. That is a crisis at the national level. At the individual level, it is an opportunity.
The students who cultivate these abilities deliberately, in a culture that increasingly discourages them, will be the ones who thrive — in admissions, in college, and beyond.
Sources:
- OECD, “PISA 2025 Results (Volume I): Future-Ready Students,” September 8, 2026
- The New York Times, “U.S. Reading Scores Plummet on Global Exam,” September 8, 2026
- Chalkbeat, “U.S. ranking on PISA international test improves as other countries decline,” September 8, 2026
- Euronews, “Pupils’ reading and maths skills slump across the world as digitalisation soars,” September 8, 2026
- National Center on Education and the Economy, “PISA 2025: Student Performance Falling as Demands on Young People Rise,” September 8, 2026