Purpose: When facing greater demands in the international job market and the innovative development and use of technologies, the youth needs a new set of skills and attitudes to succeed in an increasing well-educated global workforce. It is essential that educators prepare high school students' global literacy. In this paper, the authors survey high school students in New York City (NYC) to learn about their global literacy levels and to summarize results and interpret implications for educators. Design/methodology/approach: The authors adopted a global literacy instrument to survey 2,157 high school students. They adopted an independent sample t-test and an ANOVA to identify significant differences regarding demographic features on the Likert-scale items, used cross-tab analysis to present the profile of participants, and used the Pearson correlation coefficient to explore the degree of association between factors. Findings: From this global literacy scale, NYC high school students have relatively strong awareness of the importance of comprehending and appreciating cross-culture perspectives, have strong confidence in using new literacies to resolve problems, but have relatively low willingness to become a global citizen. Practical implications: The findings of the study support the need to improve education quality, to strengthen world languages programs, and to advocate "new literacies" practices in classrooms. Originality/value: The paper surveys high school students to learn about their global literacy levels, and to investigate factors associated with the formation of their global literacy. Most importantly, the paper adds the concept new literacies into the component of the global literacy definition to reflect the influence of technology on the high school students' global awareness. (Contains 2 figures and 5 tables.)