美国高中加强个人理财教育，39州列为必修

Well, as the school year wraps up, a new group of graduating seniors, they are entering the next chapter of their lives. Teachers, they're hoping a personal finance course will give students the financial knowledge needed to succeed. Well, I visited a personal finance classroom at the Brooklyn Preparatory Academy to see how the students are benefiting. You're gonna tell me by the end. First of all, what is Bitcoin? How would you describe it?

Personal finance is the hot new commodity in the classroom with more schools making it a requirement. According to the Council for Economic Education, 39 states mandate high school students take a personal finance course to graduate, four more than in 2024. Leslie Finnin, senior advocacy director for the CEE, says nearly thirty years ago, it wasn't even a thing. The first year we did the study in 1998, only one state required students to take personal finance.

This is reaching almost 3,000,000 graduating seniors a year. Research shows that when students take personal finance in high school, they make better financial decisions later. They have higher credit scores, lower loan default rates. When they take out student loans, they take better student loans. They just altogether are better consumers, better citizens, and make better decisions. This is similar to the chart that I just showed you.

Why do you think it was so low for so well? Because it was new. It didn't have any history. This fall, all high school students in New York State must have some sort of exposure to personal finance in order to receive their diploma. It can be embedded in an economics class or a math class or it could be electives or it can be a stand alone depending on the school and how they wanna structure it. Diana Isern is assistant principal and financial literacy educator at Brooklyn Preparatory High School.

She's been teaching her money moves class for six years, covering everything from investing in real estate to taxes and budgeting. For our students, I talk to them about credit credit scores, credit cards, credit reports, all that kind of stuff. Because if we can get to them prior to making big decisions in their life that are gonna impact them for twenty, thirty, forty years and possibly not get them into debt and so that they have to kind of climb out of holes, then we need to do that earlier and just make them aware, make them informed about those things as soon as we can.

I want you to look up today's price of one silver Bitcoin, and I want you to find out how much those pizzas would cost today. So I show my gas bill, my electric bill, my my food, my grocery list, the whole thing. And they're like, woah. It's like, you spend $500 a month on groceries? And I'm like, yeah. I'm like, that's with coupons. You know? And so so what I do is I have an assignment where they go home and they fill out an itemized list of what their family spends on these things.

If their family, of course, is comfortable sharing that. And most are most are overjoyed to share that because they're like, okay. I need this kid to know that we spend $300 on on electricity. And that's why I tell him to turn off the lights in the in in the room when he leaves. I have parents telling me asking me about opening van a Vanguard account or Fidelity or e trade. You know, whatever the the companies are, and they wanna come.

I've had parents come in. I've sat down with them and showed them in English and in Spanish. And so it's it's a cycle of of a ripple effect that continues to expand. The paper that you guys have, can you please flip it over to the other side? Leah Mahia is a senior at Brooklyn Prep and a curriculum leader for the class. I even told, like, some of my family members, like, how to start investing and, like, what to do. And, like, they're just always coming up to me like, Leah, how do you do this?

How do you start? So, yeah, it's just mainly, like, interest on, like, how to grow my money and not be so dependent on my family and how to be independent by myself. Bentley Rivera is a sophomore. My favorite part of the class is learning about the real estate because I feel like it's important to know how to own a home, how to rent a home, and that was a really fun part of the class. What do you wanna do after high school, after you graduate, and has this class changed what you what you're thinking about?

My major is going to be in finance. So this class has prepared me, like, on the basics at least so I know what I'm getting into. This class is a it made me more interested in finance, so I've been looking into other classes and stuff for it. But while personal finance takes a front row seat, economics has fallen off. Only 22 states now mandate economics for graduation, down from 26 in 2024, yet still up from 13 when the study began in 1998.

Personal finance is just so much more hands on visible. Economics is a more academic theoretical thing. We think that they're both important, and the gold standard would be a full year of economics and personal finance. So a student understands the market and how everything works and also their place in it. We'd rather they do both, but it's hard to argue that personal finance is not important. Every meeting I have, the only the first response is, yeah.

Why don't we teach kids about personal finance? So it it just makes sense. And it totally makes sense. But that last piece about how personal finance now more schools are doing it over economics is kinda interesting. But just to see how the kids come together, it starts conversations at home because I know I grew growing up, a personal find like, I didn't know how to balance a checkbook. Like, I didn't know how to do anything.

It wasn't something that we talked about at home. So it's good to see the kids do that. I was thinking back, like, in middle school, had, like, some course called, like, consumers where we, like, did learn in bronze sports about checking accounts. But, like, as they were saying as those students were saying, just learning the basics is so important, and that can kind of kick start interest in investing in other things.

I didn't have any of this, and I have a degree in foreign affairs and didn't have to take an econ class at all in graduate school. I had never had an economics class until I got to graduate school because it just wasn't required. So Is a New York phenomenon, or is it happening It's happening. It's happening across the nation, which is nice. But it's it's interesting to see at this school particularly and all the work that they're doing.

And the teacher just so much energy into it and opening up the eyes to the kids when she gives them an assignment. Like, find out what your parents spend on con ed. I guess she was saying, and the kids are like, wow. You spend that much money? Yes. Yeah. We do. Kids. So smart because it's really hard to grasp that, I think, as a kid unless you were actually looking at the numbers and the things that it costs to be a parent.

It's a lot. It helps when a teacher says it, I found. I can tell my kids it's a lot of money. And if a teacher says it, I know. And they roll their eyes at you. Yes.