On Wednesday afternoon, Maryland’s state senate will hold a hearing that could help put thousands of local students on a path toward making smart, well-informed financial decisions. The bill that is the subject of the hearing will require the State Board of Education to develop a curriculum on financial education – a course high school students would be required to complete in order to graduate.
To me, passing this bill is a no-brainer. Being able to make sound financial decisions is something all adults are expected to know how to do; but not all schools or parents go over concepts like saving, balancing a check book, or budgets.
Aaron Moore, a Baltimore high school student who will speak at the hearing, says he plans to tell lawmakers “if everybody has the knowledge they need, then they’ll be able to avoid financial tragedy like foreclosure and credit card debt, and that, in the end, helps everybody.”
Aaron’s right on the money. Poor financial decisions guided the economy into this downturn that’s impacting all of us. Greed on the part of predatory lenders may be partially to blame, but a lot of people signed loans that they didn’t understand or couldn’t afford.
In recent years, as soon as students left high school they were already on a road of financial uncertainty. They could either enter the workforce immediately with little knowledge of saving or tax status. Or they could go to college where they were likely inundated with credit card applications as soon as they stepped on campus. The rules for people under 21 receiving a credit card changed this month – a move that will likely help a lot of students at a time when the average college senior with a credit card graduates with over $4,000 in charges to pay off on that one card alone.
There are concerns that, at a time when many states are cutting costs on education, a requirement like this will cost too much money. But in the past couple of years our economy and the concepts of consumerism and capitalism have changed drastically. We owe it to students to help them keep up with what’s going on. Education could prevent this type of recession from happening again in the future.
When I was in school, my fellow students and I would complain about having to learn “useless” information. We were assured by our teachers that, in the future, we would need to know how to conjugate verbs or figure out what happens when two trains leave the station at different speeds. That may be true, but we also needed to know about annual percentage rates and credit scores. So why not teach that, too?