Or maybe not. Capital One conducted a survey of high school seniors to determine how many of these young adults are prepared to handle finances on their own. The company asked the students to rate their own levels of knowledge of personal finance. The results may be interesting, but they don’t reveal anything about financial preparedness.
If you ask students or anyone to rate their own knowledge, they can’t produce accurate answers. According to the survey results, 65 percent of the male students rated themselves “highly knowledgeable” about personal finance while only 49 percent of the female students rated themselves the same. With this information, Capital One came to the conclusion that young men are more prepared to handle personal finances independently than young women. That is the wrong conclusion here. This only proves that male students rate themselves higher than female students rate themselves.
Asking people to rate themselves is more a measure of confidence than actual knowledge. When it comes to knowledge, there are things you know, things you know you don’t know, and things you don’t know you don’t know. Think of the “known unknowns” and the “unknown unknowns” popularized by Donald Rumsfeld a few years ago. The world mocked him for sounding somewhat ridiculous, but in the case of this survey, students may not realize how many aspects of personal finance of which they have no knowledge.
Perhaps, in addition to finance, schools and parents should be teaching high school students how to understand statistics to better help detect false conclusions drawn from inadequate data. If drawn from a large enough sample size, we might conclude than male high school seniors are more likely to rate their personal finance knowledge highly, but we should not conclude that boys are more mentally prepared to handle their own finances than girls.
Capital One Survey of High School Seniors Reveals Gender Gaps in Financial Literacy
Having done all of my formal schooling in New Jersey, some of it more successful than the rest, I was excited to see a short story in NJ’s Daily Record about a bill passing through the NJ State Senate that would require basic financial skills to be taught in High Schools.
This is sorely needed in all public schools. Too many graduates don’t know how to write a check, balance a checkbook, deal with credit card bills, or what goes on when buying a house. All of those topics, and hopefully more, would be included in the proposed classes.
The State Legislature Web site has multiple bills with similar titles, but I believe this is the core of the matter:
The goal of the pilot program will be to ensure that high school graduates in the pilot districts receive instruction on budgeting, savings and investment, credit card debt, and other issues associated with personal financial responsibility. At the conclusion of the pilot program, the commissioner will report to the Governor and the Legislature on the feasibility of implementing the program on a Statewide basis.
Many of the comments on the Daily Record story are concerned with overloading the curriculum and/or extending the school day. Some have questioned whether the new class should replace Home Economics.
This is Home Economics. In my Home Economics class, we learned how to make pancakes and pillows. I would be much better off having learned to balance a checkbook. Besides, my Home Economics class was in 6th grade, and these new classes would be in High School. I recommend using “Finance 101″ to replace European History.
Thanks to Consumerist.com for highlighting this story.
Last year, I asked in high schools should require money management classes. My point of view is that such classes should be optional and/or lessons in personal finance can be incorporated into other classes throughout middle school and high school. Not everyone agrees with me, however, considering the state of financial distress many in this country face.
A commenter wrote in to describe his experience with a specific money management curriculum called Real Money, Real World, part of the Your Money NOW program sponsored by the Ohio Treasurer of State.
Schools can devote as little as 90 minutes or as much as a grading period to the program.
It works like this: Students get jobs and salaries based on their current GPA (the higher your GPA, the better paying job you get). Several booths are set-up with different signs relating life events. Students go to each to add children, housing, entertainment, cars, etc into their budget. At the end, they have to have a balanced budget.
I helped out at one of these events at my local high school and it was great to see these kids doing the math and complaining how much kids cost or how they can’t buy the clothes they want because their job doesn’t allow it.
The program sounds like a good start. I particularly like this resource: a description of the savings you could experience [pdf] by maintaining a credit score of 680 rather than 580.
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