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A Financial Literacy Program for Kids, With Corporate Sponsorship

This article was written by in Education. 10 comments.


The best place to learn solid financial behavior is at home. Although a kid’s environment at school and among peers is important in his or her development, the biggest influence on a growing child’s set of values is the behavior of the parents. Parents are role models, so in a perfect world, they are best suited to solve young adults’ lack of preparedness for handing the world from a financial perspective.

Parents, on the other hand, are often ill-equipped for this responsibility, so public school teachers are left to pick up the slack for parents who can’t or won’t be the role models necessary. The lessons aren’t difficult, but financial behavior is so embedded in life at home, poor models there can easily undo any lessons taught in a school environment. Although New Jersey updates its public school curriculum standards a few years ago to require 2.5 credits in financial, economic, business, and entrepreneurial literacy, the typical class is not going to be effective for establishing solid financial behavior.

Eighth gradePrograms that teach financial literacy need to get creative. If there’s ever a chance for the banking industry to get involved with its future customers at an early age, this is it. Capital One sees the benefit in teaching young children how to use its products and is sponsoring the “Finance Park” program, coordinated by the non-profit organization Junior Achievement.

Finance Park is a mobile program for middle school students. After a few preparatory lessons in the classroom, the students visit one of these mobile stations and a Capital One bank branch. Students are assigned a family situation (single, married, with or without children, etc.) and a job, and are faced with simulations requiring financial decisions that have consequences. Due to a lack of preparedness in real life, most people learn how to manage their money “on the job.” But even in real life, the consequences of poor financial decision-making can be somewhat removed from the decisions themselves. The distance between cause (overspending, for example) and effect (not being able to afford a house due to high debt levels, for example) are so separated that learning on the job isn’t always effective as quickly as it would need to be.

Simulations can bring the cause and effect relationship into focus.

Capital One’s presence is significant in this program. The official name of the initiative is the “Capital One Junior Achievement Finance Park” with the necessary trademark symbols. Corporate involvement doesn’t stop with Capital One. There are more co-branded programs which one might expect to see corporations training young consumers to be life-long customers, in New Jersey alone:

Elementary school grades

  • Our Nation® Sponsored by United Technologies
  • JA More than Money™ (After-school Program) Sponsored by HSBC

Middle school grades

  • JA Global Marketplace™ Sponsored by MasterCard Worldwide
  • JA Economics for Success™ Sponsored by the Allstate Foundation
  • JA America Works Sponsored by Pitney Bowes & The Literacy and Education Fund

High school grades

  • JA TITAN (Internet based) Sponsored by Oracle
  • JA Economics™ Sponsored by the MetLife Foundation
  • JA Exploring Economics™ Sponsored by the MetLife Foundation
  • JA Banks in Action™ Sponsored by the Citi Foundation
  • JA Business Ethics™ Sponsored by Deloitte
  • JA Careers with a Purpose™ Sponsored by HCA & John Templeton Foundation

Junior Achievement programs in other states have different partnerships.

Shareholders are often impressed with corporate involvement in positive social initiatives and happy when companies are beneficiaries of tax incentives for charitable spending. I am concerned about the effect of branding in education lessons for eighth-graders. Corporations should not be involved with the education of children, but these corporations have money to devote to programs like Finance Park. If it weren’t for corporate sponsorship, programs like these would likely not exist.

Corporations have been involved with public education since the 1920s, but the trend has increased in recent years. As the United States falls behind other countries in education, citizens look to blame this country’s public school system. We look to corporations that create charter schools as an alternative, with the idea that schools with a better funding source, corporate profits rather than taxpayer money, will help solve the educational crisis. Results show that charter schools have mixed results when compared with public schools.

The lessons in personal finance are important, so it’s a good thing that kids are getting the exposure to real-life simulations. Can it be done without corporate involvement and indelible branding at an impressionable age?

Photo: daveparker
Junior Achievement Finance Park, Stanford CREDO study

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The College Education Bubble and Crash

This article was written by in Education. 13 comments.

A new survey takes a look at the critical state of today’s recent college graduates. The survey questioned a nationally-representative sample of 444 recent college graduates between the ages of 22 and 29, about their employment situation and experiences. The questions also lightly touched upon these graduates’ financial condition. I’ve included a link to the full survey at the bottom of this article.

The necessity of choosing a major in college can put quite a bit of pressure on any student, particularly those who have either a wide variety of interests and talents as well as those who may not feel themselves pulled in any particular direction. There’s always the hope or the expectation that the bachelor’s degree will define a career path for the rest of one’s life, and that career path will follow a straight line or an exponential curve.

GraduationAn economist’s opinion is that students, who often go into debt to obtain their degrees, should simply look at the expected rate of return. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard or read that students should choose majors like engineering, physics, computer science, or applied mathematics to guarantee high salaries and easy job placement. Not everyone is interested or talented in these areas, and the pure financial approach says that those who aren’t shouldn’t bother spending money for a college education. The return on investment for an education is about more than just money, but that opinion doesn’t exactly make me popular in certain communities.

The financial reality is dire according to this survey. And as much as a college education has value beyond the expected return in the form of salary, no one can ignore the money-related part of the equation. Many decades ago, a college degree was a sign of differentiation, and gave holders the ability to market themselves well and qualify for the best jobs. At the same time, culture put such an emphasis on higher education that as it became available to more people — through grants and loans, not through lowered costs — it’s become less of a distinction. Colleges are basically unchecked in their tuition increases because they know that students will keep coming and the government will continue providing opportunities.

In good economic times, that can be ignored. With a low level of unemployment among graduates, former students can receive jobs, healthy incomes, and can pay down their student loan debt. In difficult times — when Baby Boomers aren’t retiring and there aren’t opportunities for younger workers, for example — the buy-now-pay-later model of education begins to fail. And it always fails for those with degrees in fields that take longer to recover their costs, like the arts and humanities.

Mark Cuban offered an apt analogy. College education is similar to the practice of flipping real estate. In the heyday of oversized, abnormal growth in the real estate market, any fool could make
money by buying a house relying heavily on debt, selling it to a bigger fool, and using the proceeds to repeat the process. There was a promise of success, and it worked well for a while — until the real estate market meltdown, followed by the Great Recession and credit crunch. A similar experience is happening today with the investment in a college education. Cuban argues that it used to be able to “flip” a college degree for a good starting salary and a solid opening to a life-long career, but the investment no longer performs so well.

With the run-up in real estate prices, it became very easy to access credit. Banks would give loans to as many customers as possible, with the knowledge the banks could repackage and sell those loans to reduce their apparent risk. The credit crunch required banks to tighten up their lending standards to the point where credit wasn’t available anywhere. Cuban believes this is where we are heading with student loans.

Years ago, policies were designed to ensure that everyone who wanted to become a homeowner could afford to do so. Taxpayers subsidized a great expansion in homeownership, and the real estate industry thrived. Education for all has been just as much a part of the American Dream, and taxpayers are subsidizing college educations for those who can’t afford it on their own. When it’s so easy to get an education for little money down, and everyone is taking advantage of free-flowing credit, we should have expected that making a return on that investment has become more difficult.

There is more student loan debt in aggregate in the United States than credit card debt, and Mark’s conclusion is that the economy won’t improve until this student loan bubble bursts. He promotes non-traditional universities — though not diploma mills, as he later warns — as the answer, because they can provide a better deal.

While colleges and universities are building new buildings for the English, social sciences and business schools, new high end, un-accredited, branded schools are popping up that will offer better educations for far, far less and create better job opportunities. As an employer I want the best prepared and qualified employees. I could care less if the source of their education was accredited by a bunch of old men and women who think they know what is best for the world. I want people who can do the job. I want the best and brightest. Not a piece of paper.

The competition from new forms of education is starting to appear… You would think traditional university educators would take notice. Beyond allowing some of their classes to be offered online, they haven’t. They won’t. Its the ultimate Innovators Dilemma. They don’t believe they should change and they won’t. Until its too late. Just as CEOs push for that one more penny per share in EPS, University Presidents care about nothing but getting their endowments and revenues up. If it means saddling an entire generation with obscene amounts of school debt, they could care less. This is how they get their long term contracts and raises.

It’s just a matter o[f] time until we see the same meltdown in traditional college education. Like the real estate industry, prices will rise until the market revolts. Then it will be too late. Students will stop taking out the loans traditional Universities expect them to. And when they do tuition will come down. And when prices come down universities will have to cut costs beyond what they are able to. They will have so many legacy costs, from tenured professors to construction projects to research they will be saddled with legacy costs and debt in much the same way the newspaper industry was. Which will all lead to a de-levering and a de-stabilization of the university system as we know it.

Just over half of recent college graduates have jobs. Many of those who do have jobs settled for a position for which their four-year degree was not necessary. 40 percent of recent graduates haven’t even begun paying off their student loan debt. Most recent graduates, while happy with their time in college, would have chosen a major after more consideration, taken different courses, or sought out more working or internship opportunities.

Photo: NazarethCollege
Blog Maverick, John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development

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Tavis Smiley: Poverty Is a Threat to Democracy

This article was written by in Economy. 17 comments.

Tavis Smiley and Dr. Cornel West have been working hard to bring the issue of poverty into the consciousness of the citizens and political discourse of the United States. As a team, Smiley and West have been touring city to city, speaking to audiences concerned about the increasing wealth gap in this country. Their book, The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifeseto, is the culmination of their observations of American citizens throughout these travels.

While the economy is technically in recovery from the Great Recession, a vast slice of Americans have not experienced a real recovery. A “jobless recovery,” where the beneficiaries of an improving economy are the wealthy while the middle class struggles with unemployment, is not a real recovery. Despite this disadvantage, the prevalence and pervasiveness of poverty is still astonishing. According to Smiley and West, 150 million people in this country are in or near poverty. That number represents one out of every two individuals — half the country.

Tavis SmileyThe issue of poverty, affecting this number of individuals, is bigger than poverty itself. The government tallies 46 million Americans living in poverty according to the 2010 census and the government’s own definitions of poverty. Many more individuals are affected by poverty because they are living dangerously close. Many middle class households, particularly those already living in debt or in a paycheck-to-paycheck situation, are one lost paycheck away from a dangerous financial situation, and many families are already experiencing a personal decline due to the inability to find gainful employment.

Poverty has traditionally been a problem classified as urban or rural. Minorities have been and are disproportionately affected by poverty, but poverty is not a suburban problem, too. With white, middle-class families now facing the issue of poverty, whether by losing a job or being dangerously close to not being able to afford their homes, the issue is gaining more attention. While poverty is making life difficult for an increasing number of Americans, those in or seeking office, whether Democrats or Republicans, are not concerned. In order to receive a voice in political discourse, you need money. While the United States may have been founded on the ideals of freedom and liberty, these have generally only been granted to an elite selection of its inhabitants. The distribution of social power is expanded only by revolution among the disenfranchised.

Smiley and West contacted Consumerism Commentary with an interest in speaking to me about these issues — to defend their position, and to open my eyes to the realities faced even by the middle class in this country, many of whom are the “new poor.” We arranged an interview for the Consumerism Commentary Podcast, airing Sunday, May 13. Unfortunately, Dr. West was unable to participate in the interview at the last minutes as he was in New York waiting for a verdict after a conviction related to a political protest in that city. Tavis Smiley was able to participate, but our time together was short. We weren’t able to address all the questions I had prepared, but the discussion was valuable.

Listen to the entire discussion with Tavis Smiley, podcast host Jay Frosting, and myself, Luke Landes, once it is available this weekend. Smiley is the host of Tavis Smiley on PBS and The Tavis Smiley Show on Public Radio International. Update: Listen to the podcast here.

In the interview, Smiley dispelled many of the myths about poverty. One such myth is the idea that those in poverty are entirely to blame for their financial situation.

On Consumerism Commentary, I’ve written that taking personal responsibility for your decisions, financial and otherwise, plays the biggest role in achieving financial security and independence. This is today’s American promise: “Anyone can make it in America.” The media love rags-to-riches stories, even if it doesn’t reflect a reality for the majority of Americans. It’s true that this country’s brand of capitalism is favorable to the situations European immigrants left behind. Religious intolerance, a caste system based on ancestry, and an economic system wherein generally only the first-born male would have rights to any property drove pioneers to create a new society or join a country with a promise to create a better life for yourself. Never mind that doing so displaced others who occupied the land here.

Even in this new society, you had to be a member of the elite to receive the rights as endowed. Not everyone begins on equal footing. The lack of early educational opportunities throughout this country is one of the strongest causes of generational poverty. As Smiley addresses in the podcast, Washington state is the home to large multi-national corporations, providing a huge advantage to those who reside in Washington thanks to the tax these companies pay. The educational opportunities in Washington state far outshine the opportunities in Washington, D.C., for example. Until a quality education for the entire country is given priority, generational poverty will continue to exist.

In the interview, we also address the issue of austerity. The concept of reducing the deficit and national debt is and should be a high priority for policymakers, but the timing of austerity measures, such as reducing funding to societal programs, is just as important. Smiley argues that we cannot cut the budget for these important issues when the economy is not “flowing,” saying that the budget is being balanced on the backs of poor people. Budgets are moral documents, and you can determine a country’s real priorities by evaluating where the money is going. If this country does not address the economy for the 99 percent — those who have seen no benefit from this “jobless recovery” — rather than the “1 percent,” Smiley warns of the downfall of the United States as a world leader.

No empire in the history of the world that at some point did not falter or fail. Every empire had its day. Americans don’t want to think we could be dangerously close to the edge… Poverty is the moral and spiritual issue of our time.

Time did not permit us to explore all the topics I would have liked to cover in the interview with Tavis Smiley. For example, I would have liked to talk more about the Occupy movement and getting a national stage for the issue of poverty. In recent weeks, civil rights are again receiving national attention, from the perspective of same-sex marriage. Not to minimize that issue of equal treatment under the law for all individuals, poverty deserves the same attention from our nation’s leaders.

Be sure to subscribe to the Consumerism Commentary Podcast to hear the interview with Tavis Smiley, where we address more topics related to poverty than are outlined above, as soon as it is available. Be sure also to read The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto. Update: The interview is now available as a podcast here.

Photo: DC Central Kitchen

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Art Is Not a Good Investment

This article was written by in Investing. 10 comments.

A few months ago, art and money were connected in the news when Andreas Gursky’s “Rhein II,” a photograph depicting a still river and walkway, became the highest-valued photograph sold at auction. The buyer paid $4 million to walk away with the larger-than-life print. Art is in the news again today, with one of Edvard Munch’s renditions of “The Scream.” At a recent Sotheby’s auction, “The Scream” was sold for $119.9 million. This price set a record, making “The Scream” the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction.

For those who have the money to spare, art is a popular investment. Trading masterpieces of art among a small subsection of the population, less than 1 percent, is not without criticism, however. Many artists do not live to see their works become valuable, and do not benefit from the high prices sought for their work. I addressed both the criticisms and the benefits of giving art a significant societal value in the article about “Rhein II.”

The Scream - Edvard MunchWhile it may be good for society to value art highly, is it a good investment for any one individual who has millions of dollars to spare?

Well, first of all, there is art accessible at all levels of investment. With research, you might find works available for $50 that could certainly increase in value over time at a rate better than what financial advisers offer as typical long-term stock market returns. Art is not an investment solely for the 1 percent. And with the right buying choices, your smaller investment in living artists has a more direct effect on the artist community.

Investing in art isn’t going to be right for everyone. While some consider art to be one of the best investments outside of real estate, the economy has seen would-be real estate investors struggling when the market isn’t robust. The same is true with art. The market is subject to bubbles, the latest trends play a significant role in determining prices, and you may not be able to sell your art at the price time you need the proceeds. Artists whose work have proven to appreciate and are highly recognized as masters, like Dali and Picasso, have price appreciation almost guaranteed, but the barrier to entry for investments in proven artists is too high for investors without the desire to risk large sums of money.

Outside of artists whose works have proven worth, it’s risky to invest in art with the goal of making a killing between the purchase date and the sale date. Even the best research won’t guarantee performance. To mitigate the chance of loss, when choosing art, find something you like. As long as you enjoy looking at your art collection, you won’t mind as much holding onto it until it has the ability to fetch the price you desire — which may be never. At the auction where “The Scream” sold for $119.9 million, one fifth of the pieces on the auction block failed to sell because no investors were willing to pay the asking prices.

Another problem with investing in art is the due diligence required to avoid scammers and fraud-minded people in the industry. Even experts can be wrong about forgeries. Investments in art are not subject to the same kinds of regulation that allows investors to feel generally safe and confident when investing in stocks and mutual funds.

Unless you have the financial ability to invest in artists whose names you know from high school or your college’s Art History course, you might be better off staying away from investing in art if your purpose is finding the next Rembrandt.

Photo: br1dotcom

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Student Loan Interest Rates Set for Increase

by Flexo
College students

Unless Congress acts soon, student loans subsidized by the government will become significantly more expensive. Mandated interest rates on subsidized student loans will jump from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent for the 2012-2013 school year. With unemployment still high for recent graduates, increased interest rates will add to the debt burden. Tuition costs are still increasing as ... Continue reading this article…

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The Rich and the Rest of Us

by Flexo
Cornel West and Tavis Smiley

Dr. Cornel West is a Princeton University professor and author. Tavis Smiley is a television and radio talk show host and author as well. The two have known each other for a long time, and last year they toured the country to hear from citizens and talk about the issue of poverty in America. After ... Continue reading this article…

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The Over-Marketization of Social Behavior

by Flexo

Do you reward your children with money for performing well in school? Do you use the promise of an allowance to ancourage appropriate behavior in the family? These are big issues, because they take appropriate behavior and can turn the incentive to financial gain. Children growing up believing that financial gain is the reward for ... Continue reading this article…

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Aurora Bank’s Deposits to Be Acquired By New York Community Bank

by Flexo

Last year, I opened a money market account with Aurora Bank, a division of Lehman Brothers. If it seemed like an odd thing to do, it probably was. Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy in 2008, yet in 2011, they were promoting their online retail bank and looking for new customers. Not wanting to associate ... Continue reading this article…

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