Main author: David Randall, NAS director of communications. Contributors: Ashley Thorne, NAS executive director; and Peter Wood, NAS president.
Assigning a summer reading to entering freshmen is a growing trend at hundreds of American colleges and universities. This report by the National Association of Scholars provides an account of freshman summer reading for the academic years 2014-2016, covering 377 assignments at 366 colleges and universities for 2014-15 and 361 assignments at 350 colleges and universities for 2015-16.
While there are several databases of common reading assignments, the annual Beach Books reports by the NAS are the most comprehensive and are the only ones to categorize the books according to their main subjects and track trends in genres, publication dates, and additional themes.
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