Building 21st Century Literacies: Beyond Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic
If you’re helping your child get ready for college, test prep and essays are just the beginning. Today’s admissions offices—and college classrooms—expect students who can navigate complex information, use AI responsibly, protect their well-being, and collaborate across cultures. These are the 21st-century literacies that tip the scales from getting in to thriving. This article explains these important areas, why they matter for admissions, first-year success, and early careers—and what you can start doing now to build those skills.
Information Literacy
Information literacy is the day-to-day discipline of finding credible sources, recognizing bias, and using digital and AI tools responsibly. National research from Stanford’s History Education Group has repeatedly shown how difficult it is—even for high-performing students—to distinguish reliable information from sophisticated misinformation online.
That reality now intersects directly with admissions: institutions such as Brown University explicitly prohibit AI-generated application content, while others, like Cornell, allow limited use for brainstorming or grammar but bar AI from drafting essays. (Read more about the role of AI in college application essays here.) On campus, course-integrated information-literacy instruction has been linked across multiple universities to higher first-year GPAs, stronger credit accumulation, and better retention—evidence that source evaluation and verification habits translate into academic persistence.
In the workplace, rigorous experiments show generative AI can boost productivity and quality on writing and communication tasks, especially for novices. One randomized study found substantial time savings and quality gains for mid-level professional writing, and a large field experiment reported a 14% productivity increase on average and a 34% gain for novices. For families, the message is clear: teach students to read laterally, cite sources, and document how they verified claims (including any AI output); if a college permits AI at all, keep it to ideas and proofreading, not drafting, and follow each school’s policy exactly.
Health & Wellness Literacy
Health and wellness literacy isn’t a “nice to have”—it’s proof a student can handle the real demands of college. Admissions officers increasingly look for signs of maturity and self-management: students who plan their sleep, manage stress, and seek help early are more likely to thrive once they’re on campus. The evidence is clear: Objective sleep studies using actigraphy across multiple campuses find that each additional hour of average nightly sleep early in the term predicts a meaningful bump in end-of-term GPA—about +0.07 GPA per hour. At the same time, longitudinal research links depressive symptoms to lower GPA and a higher likelihood of withdrawal or dropping out, and national college health assessments document sizable academic impacts from anxiety and stress.
The same habits pay dividends at work. Insufficient sleep, for example, is tied to lower labor productivity and large economic losses. Other studies link depression and anxiety to lower productivity. Protecting 7-9 hours of sleep, setting boundaries, using stress regulation skills, and asking for support before problems escalate translate to sharper focus, fewer errors, stronger collaboration, and the kind of reliability managers reward with trust and opportunity.
Practically, that means treating sleep as academic (and professional) infrastructure; normalizing seeking help early; and building simple self-management routines like timeboxing work, planning recovery time, and incorporating mindfulness into each week. The payoff shows up in persistence as much as in grades, and in workplace performance as much as in college success.
Global Literacy
Global literacy is the capacity to understand perspectives across cultures and work productively with people unlike oneself—skills that matter whether collaboration happens across town or across continents. Employers have been loud and consistent on this point: national surveys show they prize intercultural skills, teamwork across difference, and a global perspective when hiring and promoting college graduates.
Colleges, for their part, continue to prioritize building diverse learning communities because the evidence shows diversity improves learning, problem-solving, and civic preparation. The American Council on Education calls diversity “essential” to higher education’s mission, and research links meaningful interaction with diverse pers to gains in critical thinking and educational outcomes. In the wake of the 2023 Supreme Court ruling limiting race-conscious admissions, institutions have changed how they pursue the goal of diversity, often by asking students to reflect on experiences, values, community impact, and contributions to campus climate in supplemental essays.
Global literacy isn’t about passport stamps; it’s about habits and evidence of readiness to participate in, engage with, and contribute to a diverse campus community. Sustained language study, facilitating dialogue across differences, leading inclusive clubs or community initiatives, interpreting or mentoring in multilingual settings, and reflecting on these experiences signal that readiness. These experiences also build the belonging and resource-seeking behaviors that support persistence once on campus.
The through-line
These literacies aren’t add-ons; they’re multipliers. Information literacy sharpens research and safeguards authenticity, financial literacy turns opportunity into access and persistence, health literacy sustains the attention and energy learning requires, and global literacy aligns classroom experience with what colleges and employers actually value. Families who build these habits early help students navigate admissions with integrity, arrive on campus ready to thrive, and step into careers with skills that compound over time.
