Personal finance isn’t taught in most schools, which means most adults end up learning it the hard way, through a missed payment, a maxed-out card, or a retirement account started far later than they’d have liked.
Career decisions get framed almost entirely around passion and job market demand, with financial literacy rarely entering the conversation directly.
Student loans come with more misconceptions than almost any other type of debt, in part because most borrowers take them out at eighteen or nineteen, long before they’ve dealt with any other major financial product.
Employee benefits used to mean health insurance and a retirement match, full stop.
When people think about where to learn personal finance for free, a public library isn’t usually the first place that comes to mind.
Four-year universities tend to get most of the attention in conversations about campus financial literacy programs, but community colleges are quietly doing some of the more effective outreach, often reaching a student population that needs it most and has fewer existing resources to fall back on.
Most conversations about financial education focus on high school, since that’s when students are closest to their first job, first credit card, or first real financial decision.
Handing a teenager a worksheet about compound interest rarely lands the way a well-designed game does.
Financial aid offices and personal finance courses cover the theory of budgeting well enough, but a growing number of campuses have found that students are often more willing to ask basic money questions of another student than of an authority figure.
Most students leave school able to solve for x, analyze a novel, and cite a source correctly.