A Financially Empowered Public by Brooke

A Financially Empowered Public by Brooke - August 2015 Scholarship Essay

I am lucky. I am currently pursuing dual degrees from the University of Colorado, a bachelor’s in Business with a concentration in Finance, and a bachelor’s in English with a concentration in Literature. I am lucky because I learn practical financial skills in half of my classes, and critical social analysis in the others. These combined perspectives allow me to see society’s financial problems through the eyes of a business student. In my experience, society’s biggest financial problem is that, unless a student studies business, they will not obtain the foundational financial knowledge that is necessary for daily life.

Every spring, my friends ask me to help them with their job searches. I review their resumes, I do mock interviews and I guide them as they write their first cover letter. As a business student, these skills are branded into me before I finish my first semester freshmen year. Yet my friends that study sciences, communications and international relations often feel that they thrown to the sharks without a lifeboat.

These problems expand beyond my microcosm of a social group. Many Americans simply do not receive the financial education that is necessary to understand how to manage their own credit scores, their debt or their household budgets. As of July 2015, Americans owe a collective $11.86 trillion in debt from student loans to credit cards. Without any personal finance skills, how can we, as a nation, expect any better?

The problems do not end there. As my business school peers graduate and take jobs in economics and banking, their knowledge of financial systems will expand, and the gap between those with a financial education and those without will widen. When citizens need to vote on important economic policies, the majority of the public does not understand the underlying technicalities and economic mechanisms that will affect their own daily lives. We are doing a disservice to our country in allowing this to happen.

For these reasons, financial literacy should be added to the American high school curriculum. Whether or not high school students go to college, they need strong financial skills in order to successfully manage their finances. This is an important, necessary and practical addition to high school curriculum.

So what does an undergraduate student studying Business and English want to do with her life? I want to help educate the public on the everyday economic forces that affect them in a way that is both understandable and interesting; I want to be a financial journalist. Too often, coverage of major bank scandals or accounting frauds is incomplete. Most citizens do not know why they should care if the Federal Reserve raises interest rates, because they do not know how it will affect them. Journalists are often in the same boat, and so the duty of the media to inform the public falls short of its responsibility. On the other hand, those that do understand the technicalities of financial issues are usually not able to communicate them in a way that others, without any financial education, can understand or care about.
I cannot fix debt the debt crisis, and I cannot review every student’s resume, but this summer, I studied journalism at Harvard University so that I have the skills to help the issue of lack of financial education in our society by presenting the issues that affect the public in a way that they can understand and act on. An educated public is an empowered public, and perhaps in time, the importance of financial education will motivate all of us to make better, more informed economic decisions.