Dive Brief:
- Jean Chatzky, the financial editor of NBC’s “Today” show, is partnering with Time for Kids and the PwC Charitable Foundation to launch 'Your $,' a new magazine designed to teach students in fourth, fifth and sixth grade about money.
- The four-page magazine discusses topics like budgeting, investing, and taxes, and will be distributed monthly to an estimated 2 million students nationwide.
- The magazine is part of PwC’s Earn Your Future program, a five-year, $160 million commitment ($60 million in cash and $100 million worth of volunteer work) to educate children about money and finance.
Dive Insight:
More than a sixth of U.S. 15-year olds failed to meet basic proficiency benchmarks on the financial literacy section of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) exam given by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Questions on the exam ranged from simple (identifying the purpose of an invoice) to challenging (analyzing loans with different rates), and only 9.4% of the U.S. students were able to answer the more rigorous questions. According to a 2014 report from the Council for Economic Education, only 19 U.S. states require high schools to offer courses in personal finance.
Then, of course, there are the important reasons why teaching financial literacy is so key. In April, a study conducted by EverFi and Higher One found that students who took a high school financial literacy course turned into more responsible money managers. The report looked at 65,000 college students who took a financial literacy course in high school and found first-year college students who took the course did better on the survey’s financial knowledge questions, were more resistant to debt, more likely to pay credit card bills on time, and less likely to go over their card limit.
Given the fact that finances are the number one reason why students drop out of college, it seems like a given to get that knowledge to young people as soon as possible. The same way math and language arts are important, financial literacy can have massive impacts on the course of a person’s life. It's often assumed that it is the responsibility of a parent to teach, or students can innately pick up on money management, but that is not always the case. Providing those foundations in high school or younger can have profound impacts once students are independents, as the study shows.