This school year, Aragon is offering a Financial Literacy course for the first time. The elective is taught by Advanced Placement Government and Economics teacher Kevin Nelson, who has been trained as a financial planner.
Nelson has designed the curriculum to give students an overview into the world of personal finance, pulling content from college courses.
“Especially with social media, a lot of people think about day trading and getting rich quick,” said junior Matthew Hagedorn, a current Financial Literacy student and Economics Club president. “This is more about, how do I find financial stability? How do I get a retirement account? How do I do taxes? Having a little bit of that background helps you navigate [the financial advice on social media] better so you’re not so easily swayed or misled.”
A lack of knowledge about how to manage money can be detrimental in some circumstances.
“In the early 2000s [or] late 1990s, I got a phone call from the mayor of Burlingame and [they] asked me to put on a financial literacy workshop, because so many students [had] gotten themselves an incredibly large amount of debt,” Nelson said. “Students were leaving college because … they couldn’t handle it … I originally started with a course called college financial survival [and] it became very popular. I even had a group of individuals who [were] incarcerated [and] were brought over by probation officers to participate in the workshop, because they [were] like, this is what’s going to keep you from being in prison.”
The effects of making uneducated financial decisions can be long-lasting and difficult to move on from, especially as a young adult.
“I had friends who [got] into trouble financially because emergencies happen and they may not have been fully aware [that] the decisions they were making to handle those emergencies [would] cost them many, many years to kind of climb out of debt,” said Heather Sadlon, Advanced Placement United States History and Government and Economics teacher.
This can be seen as an issue all over the country; according to an article in the Journal of Consumer Affairs, fewer than a third of young adults possess basic knowledge of interest rates, inflation and risk diversification.
This has led many to advocate for financial literacy to be taught in schools. Among them is the Palo Alto based company Next Gen Personal Finance, which started the non-profit NGPF Mission 2030. They have made it their goal to make personal finance a mandatory stand-alone course in every state by 2030. As of Sept. 2024, they have succeeded in 26 states, with California being the most recent to pass financial literacy legislation.
The state of California announced plans to make a financial literacy course a graduation requirement in California high schools on June 27. Many are enthusiastic about this step toward making financial literacy more widespread.
“I’m definitely excited about the possibilities of being able to go more in depth with these topics that will become really, really important to [students] within a year from when they take the class,” Sadlon said.
Some students have been hoping for financial literacy to be more prevalent in high school curriculums.
“It’s unfortunate that [financial literacy was] … not something that’s [mandatory] like Health or Ethnic Studies because I truly feel like it’s such a necessity,” said sophomore and officer of the Smart Money Club Reet Bhatia. “You should know how to manage your money, because it is more or less a life skill.”
The introduction of this required course at Aragon means students will no longer take Economics during their senior year, which students and teachers alike see as unfortunate news.
“Economics is an incredibly important discipline,” Nelson said. “Removing the ability to understand decision making and how markets work is, to me, is not a good decision. [But] we have only so much space in the day, and personal finance has to come in.”
The decision to introduce financial literacy while taking away economics has left some feeling torn.
“It’s tricky, because … you’re kind of moving one step forward, maybe one or two steps back,” Hagedorn said. “I think you need both [economics and financial literacy], because they both bring a lot of benefits.”
Overall, many agree that the introduction of financial literacy at Aragon will be beneficial to its students, even if it means making future compromises in terms of the availability of other classes.
The mandated semester-long Financial Literacy course will take effect in California beginning with the class of 2031.
