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I think financial literacy is a good idea for high school students but an entire semester seems like overkill. Everything one needs to know could probably be a

I think financial literacy is a good idea for high school students but an entire semester seems like overkill. Everything one needs to know could probably be a one week course or two weeks tops. The downside is that high school already is very little room for electives so now that’s a semester less of whatever students would like.

dhosek 5y ago
I think you underestimate the amount of time that it takes to convey information in a high school classroom. For example, four years of language instruction at the high school level, assuming that the student manages to pass the AP exam at the end of it, gives that student the equivalent of two semesters of language instruction at the college level. A one-year math class in high school (with roughly 180 classroom days) is taught in colleges in a single semester (with 45 classroom days). Part of this is that there will be a lot of hands-on in-class experience as part of the instruction. Illinois requires 9 weeks of consumer education which is usually made part of another class although the local high school's requirement is either a semester-long class or AP Economics.
- urthor 5y ago
  Keep in mind also that that's because in high school the number of hours per week are far more limited. High school has a part of a highly varied curriculum. For example, students almost never spend more than 25% of their time on just math. Whilst in university, a single paper involves spending 25% of your time on a single sub topic like geometry.
  - dhosek 5y ago
    >Keep in mind also that that's because in high school the number of hours per week are far more limited. I don’t understand what you’re claiming here. At least in terms of classroom contact time, the number of hours is much higher in high school (typically five 50 minute periods per week vs. three 50 minute periods per week in college) and the school year is longer (20–21 weeks per semester vs 15 in college).
- julianlam 5y ago
  > A one-year math class in high school (with roughly 180 classroom days) is taught in colleges in a single semester That's forgiving. One year of calculus in high school (first principles and derivatives) was taught in a single week (3 hours) in undergrad calculus. University of Toronto. Infamous for taking in a ton of undergrads for the money, giving as few supports as possible, and then just failing a whole lot of them out.
- jacobolus 5y ago
  Language instruction by traditional courses/curriculum is grossly inefficient and ineffective, because courses focus on judging and ranking the students in whatever way is easiest for the teacher to measure rather than on language acquisition per se. Many students come out of several years of instruction with next to no proficiency in the target language, and when they visit a country speaking that language end up lost and confused, unable to follow the most basic native conversations, let alone speak fluently themselves. Courses should focus substantially on maximizing comprehensible input of spoken language for at least the first half year, with negligible emphasis placed on students trying to learn formally (grammar, spelling, etc.) or make utterances in the target language. After 2–3 years courses should predominantly focus on reading. Get one student to take a traditional 1 hour per day Spanish course for 3 years and another student to watch an hour of https://youtube.com/c/DreamingSpanish/ https://youtube.com/c/DreamingSpanish/ every day for 1 year and the second student will come out ahead. And that’s just completely passive content from YouTube: a student who has conversations for an hour per day with native target-language speakers (where the student doesn’t try to produce the target language themselves but only listen to it) is going to do better still.
prostoalex 5y ago
I’ve had something similar to this in high school. We learned the basics of checking and savings accounts, how to write checks and what those funky numbers on the slip meant, how to balance checkbooks (kinda dating myself here), what credit cards are, how mortgages work, how to prepare for a car loan, what impacts credit history, various surprise fees one can accrue (such as using out of network ATMs, or using credit cards for a cash advance). Around April someone’s accountant dad taught us to fill in 1040EZ. A manager of a local bank branch explained how CDs worked. For something taught once a week a semester seemed like the right amount, but it was definitely low-key low-intensity class.
rco8786 5y ago
No way! How interest works, credit cards, debit cards, checking accounts, savings accounts, money market accounts, brokerage accounts, bonds and time value of money, the stock market (this subject alone can be multiple semesters), IRAs, 401ks, Roth variants, 403bs, pentions, paychecks, taxes (again multiple semesters), mortgages, loans Giving kids early knowledge of these things is one of the most valuable and useful bases of knowledge that we can give to the next generation.
nradov 5y ago
Dilbert creator Scott Adams reduced personal finance to 9 points. You can maybe quibble with a few of the details but for the majority of middle-class Americans it's good enough. 1. Make a will 2. Pay off your credit cards 3. Get term life insurance if you have a family to support 4. Fund your 401(k) to the maximum 5. Fund your IRA to the maximum 6. Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it 7. Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account 8. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement 9. If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio
- avs733 5y ago
  these are great!...until we scratch the surface and realize each of these can be done incredibly well or incredibly poorly. There is an enormous amount of implicit knowledge in them. And when knowledge is left implicit in instructions, it gets filled in with what knowledge and knowledge structures already existed. E.g., paying off credit cards probably means paying them off monthly, but what if it means paying off all the debt I've already accumulated. Do I have to make a will before that? Guiding credible knowledge construction is hard The unspoken issue in this thread is that financial education, in fact a lot of education nowadays unfortunately, is unlearning things that are taught wrong at home. If the parents have a bad (not null...bad) understanding of financial literacy or role model bad things, you are fighting an uphill battle. Scott Adams list is typically shallow...it provides just enough information to look credible while leaving enough flexibility that anyone who fails at this is blamed instead.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  The knowledge that most people need for personal finance can fit on an index card: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Index_Card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Index_Card
MikePlacid 5y ago
As a parent I clearly saw 3 things that would have given my kids an unfair advantage in their adult life: 1. The foundations of the American legal system - the Mock Trial club took care of that. 2. Financial literacy - I was lazy so I’ve just thrown them some book, like Motley Fool or something. That was enough - for these exact 3 kids. But I can imagine adding some fun in financial course, you can run some mock (or real if you are not scared) investment club etc. The real life issues need not be dull. 3. Learning to fly a small plane - but I’ve realized the advantages of this skill too late, when my friend was flying me from my home to my summer house - over endless lines of stalled traffic…
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > 2. Financial literacy - I was lazy so I’ve just thrown them some book, like Motley Fool or something. That was enough - for these exact 3 kids. The knowledge that most people need for personal finance can fit on an index card: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Index_Card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Index_Card
- prepend 5y ago
  > an unfair advantage in their adult life How are those unfair advantages? They seem pretty fair.
avs733 5y ago
My lab has research data that engineering students who are nearing the end of their BS degree and are enrolled in entrepreneurship minors and certificates who cannot differentiate between revenue and profit. What is really interesting is that when asked directly, they can clearly articulate the difference. However, when making decisions typical of early stage entrepreneurship - the terms collapse in on one another and they rely on a series of interesting heuristics that are badly biased towards how entrepreneurs are represented in media. The reality is that education is slow - especially education about a topic that comes with a lot of 'colloquial baggage'. Students here these terms and have a mental model/memory structure of them. Teaching what seems like 'simple' things is way more than transferring information. It's not bits sent through the air - its like doing an over the air firmware update using AM radio when the received may not have had its battery properly charged - and also installing new programs at the same time.
- urthor 5y ago
  What I see with finance is a HUGE discrepancy between out of classroom learning. High socioeconomic advantaged students are just prepared incredibly well for these discussions. It's very, very uphill for students who don't have that background of wealth to make up for a lifetime of family attention to the world of finance. Ultimately university coursework is mostly just an introduction to any topic. You have to find the passion to make it a subject of your "dinner table" time to make any progress in a field.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  I'd bet many couldn't explain what a logarithm is either.
  - avs733 5y ago
    I don't know, we didn't ask that.
- ketzo 5y ago
  Do you have links to any kind of published data/papers about this? That’s really interesting and I would love to learn more.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
I can see sacrificing a half year of history for this. Practicality has a place in academics as much as lots of other classes. Personally I would have a year long class around the sophomore year on critical thinking and spotting propaganda and bullshit. I taught my kids how to spot bullshit and question everything and I think it has served them well. It got them in trouble a couple of times with teachers but it was a learning experience.

dhosek 5y ago

I think you underestimate the amount of time that it takes to convey information in a high school classroom. For example, four years of language instruction at the high school level, assuming that the student manages to pass the AP exam at the end of it, gives that student the equivalent of two semesters of language instruction at the college level. A one-year math class in high school (with roughly 180 classroom days) is taught in colleges in a single semester (with 45 classroom days). Part of this is that there will be a lot of hands-on in-class experience as part of the instruction. Illinois requires 9 weeks of consumer education which is usually made part of another class although the local high school's requirement is either a semester-long class or AP Economics.

urthor 5y ago
Keep in mind also that that's because in high school the number of hours per week are far more limited. High school has a part of a highly varied curriculum. For example, students almost never spend more than 25% of their time on just math. Whilst in university, a single paper involves spending 25% of your time on a single sub topic like geometry.
- dhosek 5y ago
  >Keep in mind also that that's because in high school the number of hours per week are far more limited. I don’t understand what you’re claiming here. At least in terms of classroom contact time, the number of hours is much higher in high school (typically five 50 minute periods per week vs. three 50 minute periods per week in college) and the school year is longer (20–21 weeks per semester vs 15 in college).
julianlam 5y ago
> A one-year math class in high school (with roughly 180 classroom days) is taught in colleges in a single semester That's forgiving. One year of calculus in high school (first principles and derivatives) was taught in a single week (3 hours) in undergrad calculus. University of Toronto. Infamous for taking in a ton of undergrads for the money, giving as few supports as possible, and then just failing a whole lot of them out.
jacobolus 5y ago
Language instruction by traditional courses/curriculum is grossly inefficient and ineffective, because courses focus on judging and ranking the students in whatever way is easiest for the teacher to measure rather than on language acquisition per se. Many students come out of several years of instruction with next to no proficiency in the target language, and when they visit a country speaking that language end up lost and confused, unable to follow the most basic native conversations, let alone speak fluently themselves. Courses should focus substantially on maximizing comprehensible input of spoken language for at least the first half year, with negligible emphasis placed on students trying to learn formally (grammar, spelling, etc.) or make utterances in the target language. After 2–3 years courses should predominantly focus on reading. Get one student to take a traditional 1 hour per day Spanish course for 3 years and another student to watch an hour of https://youtube.com/c/DreamingSpanish/ https://youtube.com/c/DreamingSpanish/ every day for 1 year and the second student will come out ahead. And that’s just completely passive content from YouTube: a student who has conversations for an hour per day with native target-language speakers (where the student doesn’t try to produce the target language themselves but only listen to it) is going to do better still.

prostoalex 5y ago

I’ve had something similar to this in high school. We learned the basics of checking and savings accounts, how to write checks and what those funky numbers on the slip meant, how to balance checkbooks (kinda dating myself here), what credit cards are, how mortgages work, how to prepare for a car loan, what impacts credit history, various surprise fees one can accrue (such as using out of network ATMs, or using credit cards for a cash advance). Around April someone’s accountant dad taught us to fill in 1040EZ. A manager of a local bank branch explained how CDs worked. For something taught once a week a semester seemed like the right amount, but it was definitely low-key low-intensity class.

rco8786 5y ago

No way! How interest works, credit cards, debit cards, checking accounts, savings accounts, money market accounts, brokerage accounts, bonds and time value of money, the stock market (this subject alone can be multiple semesters), IRAs, 401ks, Roth variants, 403bs, pentions, paychecks, taxes (again multiple semesters), mortgages, loans Giving kids early knowledge of these things is one of the most valuable and useful bases of knowledge that we can give to the next generation.

nradov 5y ago

Dilbert creator Scott Adams reduced personal finance to 9 points. You can maybe quibble with a few of the details but for the majority of middle-class Americans it's good enough. 1. Make a will 2. Pay off your credit cards 3. Get term life insurance if you have a family to support 4. Fund your 401(k) to the maximum 5. Fund your IRA to the maximum 6. Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it 7. Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account 8. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement 9. If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio

avs733 5y ago
these are great!...until we scratch the surface and realize each of these can be done incredibly well or incredibly poorly. There is an enormous amount of implicit knowledge in them. And when knowledge is left implicit in instructions, it gets filled in with what knowledge and knowledge structures already existed. E.g., paying off credit cards probably means paying them off monthly, but what if it means paying off all the debt I've already accumulated. Do I have to make a will before that? Guiding credible knowledge construction is hard The unspoken issue in this thread is that financial education, in fact a lot of education nowadays unfortunately, is unlearning things that are taught wrong at home. If the parents have a bad (not null...bad) understanding of financial literacy or role model bad things, you are fighting an uphill battle. Scott Adams list is typically shallow...it provides just enough information to look credible while leaving enough flexibility that anyone who fails at this is blamed instead.
throw0101a 5y ago
The knowledge that most people need for personal finance can fit on an index card: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Index_Card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Index_Card

MikePlacid 5y ago

As a parent I clearly saw 3 things that would have given my kids an unfair advantage in their adult life: 1. The foundations of the American legal system - the Mock Trial club took care of that. 2. Financial literacy - I was lazy so I’ve just thrown them some book, like Motley Fool or something. That was enough - for these exact 3 kids. But I can imagine adding some fun in financial course, you can run some mock (or real if you are not scared) investment club etc. The real life issues need not be dull. 3. Learning to fly a small plane - but I’ve realized the advantages of this skill too late, when my friend was flying me from my home to my summer house - over endless lines of stalled traffic…

throw0101a 5y ago
> 2. Financial literacy - I was lazy so I’ve just thrown them some book, like Motley Fool or something. That was enough - for these exact 3 kids. The knowledge that most people need for personal finance can fit on an index card: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Index_Card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Index_Card
prepend 5y ago
> an unfair advantage in their adult life How are those unfair advantages? They seem pretty fair.

avs733 5y ago

My lab has research data that engineering students who are nearing the end of their BS degree and are enrolled in entrepreneurship minors and certificates who cannot differentiate between revenue and profit. What is really interesting is that when asked directly, they can clearly articulate the difference. However, when making decisions typical of early stage entrepreneurship - the terms collapse in on one another and they rely on a series of interesting heuristics that are badly biased towards how entrepreneurs are represented in media. The reality is that education is slow - especially education about a topic that comes with a lot of 'colloquial baggage'. Students here these terms and have a mental model/memory structure of them. Teaching what seems like 'simple' things is way more than transferring information. It's not bits sent through the air - its like doing an over the air firmware update using AM radio when the received may not have had its battery properly charged - and also installing new programs at the same time.

urthor 5y ago
What I see with finance is a HUGE discrepancy between out of classroom learning. High socioeconomic advantaged students are just prepared incredibly well for these discussions. It's very, very uphill for students who don't have that background of wealth to make up for a lifetime of family attention to the world of finance. Ultimately university coursework is mostly just an introduction to any topic. You have to find the passion to make it a subject of your "dinner table" time to make any progress in a field.
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
I'd bet many couldn't explain what a logarithm is either.
- avs733 5y ago
  I don't know, we didn't ask that.
ketzo 5y ago
Do you have links to any kind of published data/papers about this? That’s really interesting and I would love to learn more.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

I can see sacrificing a half year of history for this. Practicality has a place in academics as much as lots of other classes. Personally I would have a year long class around the sophomore year on critical thinking and spotting propaganda and bullshit. I taught my kids how to spot bullshit and question everything and I think it has served them well. It got them in trouble a couple of times with teachers but it was a learning experience.