Study: Most states don’t score well on financial literacy
Bryan Lee, 14, left, of Alexandria takes notes Jan. 23, 2013, as he looks at stock numbers with other eighth-graders from Holmes Middle School. The students were participating in a financial literacy program at the Junior Achievement Financial Academy, run in partnership with Capital One Bank. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
Given the extraordinary amount of debt that Americans wallow in daily, you’d think that teaching financial literacy in school and at home would be a priority. Guess again. A new study on the state of financial literacy programs in public schools ranks only 7 states with an A and 22 with a D or F. And it says that parents are no more comfortable talking to their kids about sex than they are about money, so young people aren’t learning about the subject at home, either.
The study, which you can find here, was done by the Center for Financial Literacy at Champlain College, which assigned grades to states for the quality of their financial literacy programs. It says in part:
We would not allow a young person to get in the driver’s seat of a car without requiring drivers education, and yet we allow our youth to enter the complex financial world often without any related education. An uneducated individual armed with a credit card, a student loan and access to a mortgage can be nearly as
