Uncommon Core by Elizabeth

Uncommon Core by Elizabeth - August 2015 Scholarship Essay

High school is required to teach skills to students that are applicable in academic, social, and psychological life. Many schools have the following common subjects as essentials of the American high school curriculum: math, science, english, foreign language, history, physical education, and the arts. These subjects are informative and bolster the knowledge of adolescents becoming young adults. Yet are these subjects enough to prepare America’s teens for going into the real world? These subjects are essentials to function as a normal member of society, but the curriculum always has room for improvement. One “required” skill, as high school seniors graduate from their hometowns and are shipped off into the real world, is how to budget their money and balance their checkbooks. This subject matter should be added to the American high school curriculum in order to teach the future how the economy works and how to manage their money so that America’s future and image is upheld on the global scheme as well as internally among its people.

Being a high school graduate, the complaint most prevalent amongst peers, online sources, and throughout the years has been college students coming home after their freshman year totally and completely depleted of money. There is a reason the phrase “broke college student” exists, and perhaps American schools in the near future can change that. These young adults were never taught that skill in school, and unless their parents taught them at home, these students arrive at college ill equipped on how to manage their money. With the massive amounts of homework, projects, sports, and pressure high school puts on its students, finding additional time to learn a subject not taught in school is a struggle for most families; therefore the students never get taught and misuse their money once they move out of the house. Adding a graduation requirement of learning financial “secrets” by experts and advisors, the common lingo about different types of bank accounts and savings, and figuring out how to manage money can only be beneficial to a student who is about to live on their own. Learning banking information, students maturing into adults will have more knowledge and responsibility about where they should spend their money, what they should invest in for both long-term and short-term, and how to distribute whatever earnings they are receiving into categories such as spending, savings, investment, and miscellaneous—i.e. church tithes, charitable actions, repayments for loans, etc.

Understandably, college students still must survive on some sort of budget from their families, and if that is not an option, working for their money while going to class still does not leave them basking in riches. This new class will not suddenly stop the low budget lifestyle that is a sort of a “rite of passage” that is the college lifestyle. The “broke” mentality and stereotype will most likely never cease, yet it can be lessened with the skills to save every penny earned and found. Although this new addition of a class will not solve all financial problems and unknowns, it can be very beneficial to the student recipient to glean the knowledge of how to handle their funds without graduating college with massive debt and loans to pay off; therefore the percentage of adults paying off loans will decrease and inversely, the percentage of adults spending and putting their money into the economy will increase.