Everything one needs to know could probably be a one week course or two weeks tops.
The downside is that high school already is very little room for electives so now that’s a semester less of whatever students would like.
Illinois requires 9 weeks of consumer education which is usually made part of another class although the local high school's requirement is either a semester-long class or AP Economics.
High school has a part of a highly varied curriculum.
For example, students almost never spend more than 25% of their time on just math. Whilst in university, a single paper involves spending 25% of your time on a single sub topic like geometry.
I don’t understand what you’re claiming here. At least in terms of classroom contact time, the number of hours is much higher in high school (typically five 50 minute periods per week vs. three 50 minute periods per week in college) and the school year is longer (20–21 weeks per semester vs 15 in college).
That's forgiving. One year of calculus in high school (first principles and derivatives) was taught in a single week (3 hours) in undergrad calculus.
University of Toronto. Infamous for taking in a ton of undergrads for the money, giving as few supports as possible, and then just failing a whole lot of them out.
Courses should focus substantially on maximizing comprehensible input of spoken language for at least the first half year, with negligible emphasis placed on students trying to learn formally (grammar, spelling, etc.) or make utterances in the target language. After 2–3 years courses should predominantly focus on reading.
Get one student to take a traditional 1 hour per day Spanish course for 3 years and another student to watch an hour of https://youtube.com/c/DreamingSpanish/ every day for 1 year and the second student will come out ahead. And that’s just completely passive content from YouTube: a student who has conversations for an hour per day with native target-language speakers (where the student doesn’t try to produce the target language themselves but only listen to it) is going to do better still.
Giving kids early knowledge of these things is one of the most valuable and useful bases of knowledge that we can give to the next generation.
What is really interesting is that when asked directly, they can clearly articulate the difference. However, when making decisions typical of early stage entrepreneurship - the terms collapse in on one another and they rely on a series of interesting heuristics that are badly biased towards how entrepreneurs are represented in media.
The reality is that education is slow - especially education about a topic that comes with a lot of 'colloquial baggage'. Students here these terms and have a mental model/memory structure of them. Teaching what seems like 'simple' things is way more than transferring information. It's not bits sent through the air - its like doing an over the air firmware update using AM radio when the received may not have had its battery properly charged - and also installing new programs at the same time.
High socioeconomic advantaged students are just prepared incredibly well for these discussions.
It's very, very uphill for students who don't have that background of wealth to make up for a lifetime of family attention to the world of finance.
Ultimately university coursework is mostly just an introduction to any topic. You have to find the passion to make it a subject of your "dinner table" time to make any progress in a field.
https://peer.asee.org/engineering-students-misuse-of-busines...
1. Make a will
2. Pay off your credit cards
3. Get term life insurance if you have a family to support
4. Fund your 401(k) to the maximum
5. Fund your IRA to the maximum
6. Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it
7. Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account
8. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement
9. If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio
E.g., paying off credit cards probably means paying them off monthly, but what if it means paying off all the debt I've already accumulated. Do I have to make a will before that?
Guiding credible knowledge construction is hard
The unspoken issue in this thread is that financial education, in fact a lot of education nowadays unfortunately, is unlearning things that are taught wrong at home. If the parents have a bad (not null...bad) understanding of financial literacy or role model bad things, you are fighting an uphill battle.
Scott Adams list is typically shallow...it provides just enough information to look credible while leaving enough flexibility that anyone who fails at this is blamed instead.
Around April someone’s accountant dad taught us to fill in 1040EZ. A manager of a local bank branch explained how CDs worked.
For something taught once a week a semester seemed like the right amount, but it was definitely low-key low-intensity class.
1. The foundations of the American legal system - the Mock Trial club took care of that.
2. Financial literacy - I was lazy so I’ve just thrown them some book, like Motley Fool or something. That was enough - for these exact 3 kids. But I can imagine adding some fun in financial course, you can run some mock (or real if you are not scared) investment club etc. The real life issues need not be dull.
3. Learning to fly a small plane - but I’ve realized the advantages of this skill too late, when my friend was flying me from my home to my summer house - over endless lines of stalled traffic…
The knowledge that most people need for personal finance can fit on an index card:
How are those unfair advantages? They seem pretty fair.