Money, Money, Money by Maddie

Money, Money, Money by Maddie - November 2021 Scholarship Essay

I don’t manage my money. I mean, I’m 17, and lucky enough to have parents who will foot the bill if I ever get into financial hot water. But not everyone has that, and in a couple of years I’m going to be on my own. Kids my age shouldn’t have to wait until they hit the real world to get their crash course in managing finances. Just like we learn to write good essays and factor polynomials and memorize the carbon cycle, we should learn good financial practices in school.
Like I said, I’m on the lucky side. My school offers a course in financial math, so it’s available to me if I want it. But I can’t want it, because it would take up a slot in my already packed academic schedule I need for more AP and college level courses. That needs to change now. So, I think finance should become a core class in high school. Just like we need math and science and history and English, we should know how to handle money, because in the grand scheme of things all of our academic knowledge won’t matter much if we’re broke.
In the United States, everyone deals with money. No matter what background you come from, money touches every high school student in some way, whether that’s paying for your own gas and days out with my friends (the way I do), or even all the way up to paying rent and being a key contributor to family finances. Rich or poor, money management is a skill that we all deserve to learn, and a skill we will have to learn when we become adults.
When we think about where American students go after high school, we usually think of college. But in reality, only about 69% of students pick that path (Champlain College), meaning about 31% of graduating high school students are entering the workforce full-time. Since finance is not a core class, there is no guarantee that these students will have even a cursory knowledge of how to manage their money.
There are so many skills that us students need to know to be financially stable when we get older. How to put down the first, last, and security payments for our first apartment. How to file our taxes. How to separate money between savings and checking, and make sure we have some money set aside for an emergency. I know all of these skills are necessities, but I couldn’t tell you the first thing about how to actually put these skills into practice.
It can be argued that there’s other classes that might take precedence over finance when considering what classes in school should be more emphasized. Perhaps American students should be focusing more of their energy on foreign languages such as Spanish and Chinese to gain an edge in the increasingly global economy. Perhaps we should rely on our adult guardians and older members of the community to take responsibility for our financial education. But I think we need to consider that school can be a unique place to learn financial literacy.
As has been shown by the increasing movement in schools to foster students’ computer programming skills (Hour of Code), it is possible to introduce new concepts into the set of skills that students are required to learn before they leave school. My generation of students has watched our school environments change almost completely to suit the technological age. I still remember how wild it was to see my classroom blackboard replaced by a SmartBoard. The purpose of school is to prepare the next generation for the world they’re going to live in, and I can see no better way in this moment than to put an emphasis on learning finances. Please, teach me how to manage my money.