College is often described as preparation for a career, but it is also supposed to prepare students to make sense of a complicated world. That requires more than completing readings and producing papers on deadline. Students move between many kinds of online material every day, including academic sources, news, entertainment, and information related to sports and betting. A student can move from a peer-reviewed article to practical online content, such as a guide to using bet365 android, within the same browsing session, yet the same basic questions still matter: Who created this information, what is it trying to accomplish, and what evidence deserves trust? Colleges should treat that kind of literacy as a central academic skill rather than assume students already possess it.
Literacy Is More Than Knowing How to Read
By the time students arrive on campus, professors understandably expect them to read and write at a high level. But being technically capable of reading a text is different from knowing how to read carefully, recognize weak evidence, identify an author’s assumptions, or explain why one source is more reliable than another. Those skills become especially important when students face dense academic material alongside a constant stream of online information.
Princeton already recognizes part of this problem. The Princeton Writing Program describes its first-year seminars as a foundation for students’ continued development as critical readers, writers, and researchers. That is a valuable starting point, but literacy should not become something students formally practice in one introductory course and then encounter only indirectly. It should remain visible throughout an undergraduate education.
Every Discipline Depends on Strong Literacy
A chemistry major and a history major may read very different material, but both need to interpret claims, evaluate evidence, and communicate conclusions. An engineering student needs to understand the limitations of a technical report. A politics student needs to distinguish careful analysis from rhetoric. A future doctor, lawyer, teacher, or business leader will regularly make decisions based on documents whose meaning is not always obvious on a first reading.
This is why colleges should build literacy instruction into courses across departments rather than treating it as the responsibility of English or writing programs alone. Professors could spend more time showing students how experts in their fields actually read: what they notice first, which claims make them skeptical, how they verify information, and how they recognize uncertainty. Those habits are difficult to learn when students are simply assigned another hundred pages and expected to figure out the process themselves.
Digital Literacy Belongs in the Classroom Too
The challenge now extends beyond books and academic journals. Students encounter news, social media, AI-generated content, videos, and commercial websites every day, making it essential to evaluate sources, recognize persuasive intent, and identify missing context.
Colleges can address this within existing courses. Students might compare research with media coverage, examine how statistics are framed, or practice verifying digital sources before citing them.
College should prepare graduates to question what they read, recognize weak evidence, and communicate clearly. In an information-heavy environment, these are essential academic and everyday skills.
The Daily Princetonian’s editorial staff do not edit or otherwise review sponsored content.
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