Personal Finance Is a Must by Alexandra

Personal Finance Is a Must by Alexandra - January 2023 Scholarship Essay

I sincerely find a lot of value in allowing high school students feel the freedom of selecting electives and extracurriculars on their own. It lets teenagers and young adults take their education and interests into their own hands. However, it is absolutely crucial that there are some common courses that students are required to take. I think that a personal finance class should be required in all schools. “Personal finance” is a bit of a broad term, so to be specific, I mean a class that educates students on important financial skills like building good credit scores, understanding local and federal taxes as well as how to do them, and overall good financial habits. As an 18-year-old college student, I still feel very clueless when it comes to most things financially, and it is really hard to even figure out where to begin to educate myself on the topic. This makes the idea of trying to learn more about the topic on my own extremely intimidating in my opinion, and I am confident that many others agree. I believe this is a far too common experience for teenagers that are soon entering adulthood. So, there needs to be a solution. This solution would make it simple. Personal finance classes should be a requirement in high school.

Many schools offer slightly similar courses to their students, but I feel that these optional electives need to be made a part of the required core curriculum. However, an issue I see with many finance classes that are already offered in many schools is that they don’t focus on topics that students want to learn in that class. In my experience, the course offered by my high school was advertised as a way of learning good financial habits, but it was mainly focused on the stock market and investing. This was a severe let down to myself and my fellow peers because we felt it didn’t teach us anything that we were actually interested in learning such as taxes or credit scores. By making a class that incorporates learning objectives such as the topics I mentioned previously, it would allow for more young adults to be better equipped to advocate for themselves financially in the future. This is such an important idea to me and I truly feel that this would be extraordinarily beneficial to our upcoming generations. It allows students to be well prepared to take their futures into their own hands and build financial habits that let them grow and succeed as adults.