Financial literacy curriculum would educate students of essential life skills

It happens all the time. College students begin receiving offers for credit cards and begin going out to dinner every night, buying expensive clothes or taking trips with money they don't have.

The result: thousands of dollars of credit-card debt at double-digit interest rates. In some cases, bankruptcy soon follows.

These kinds of financial follies could be avoided if young people were more educated about their money and the best way to give them this financial literacy is to implement financial literacy curriculum into high school classes.

Currently, the state does not require high schoolers to take a financial literacy class before they graduate. As a result, students graduate from high school without knowing how to pay bills, build good credit and avoid debt — the essentials of living as an adult in the U.S.

In WalletHub’s Most & Least Financially Literate report, the state of California received a B-minus. Although California ranks 25th overall in the report, its knowledge and education ranks 45th out of the 50 states.

This is no surprise. In a similar report, the National Report Card on State Efforts to Improve Financial Literacy in High Schools, the Center for Financial Literacy gave each state a grade based on how many hours of personal finance instruction the state’s high schools’ provided — an A grade: 60 hours of instruction, a B grade: 15 or more hours, and so on.

According to this report, only five states in the country received an A; these five states require high schoolers to take a semester of personal finance courses. California was one of 11 states to get an F, with “virtually no requirements for teaching financial literacy at the high school level.”

Being financially literate may seem irrelevant to high schoolers, who are still overwhelmingly dependent on their parents. But high schoolers must remember that in a few years they’ll be in college, perhaps relying on student loans and looking for jobs. And after graduation, they’ll have to face the baffling tax return forms, health insurance questions and credit card bills on their own.

For this reason, Saratoga should provide a financial literacy elective class or add it to a required class’s curriculum to bolster this aspect of education. This class could be a semester-long course, similar to the required financial literacy courses in schools in Utah, which was the only state to receive an A-plus in the report. Even a condensed curriculum within a class like Economics would give students exposure to these unfamiliar financial topics.

As a high school, we can pride ourselves knowing that our students are not only educated in Common Core, but also in common life skills.