Students need to be trained for not just college, but life in general

Saratoga students are clearly among the best and brightest anywhere. Business Insider recently ranked Saratoga High as the 23rd best public school in the U.S. But the truth is, school smarts can only get us so far.

When many of us graduate from the school and leave the infamous Saratoga bubble to enter the real world of college and beyond, we are going to get slapped by how little we really know. There are no classes that teach us life skills like how to balance a checkbook or stay out of debt.

I know many students who do not even know how to address and stamp an envelope. While our generation has Google to come to the rescue, this information should be taught as general knowledge, not something that needs to be researched.

Project on Student’s Debt estimates that 52 percent of all four-year college students in California are in debt. It is terrible to think that every other student going out of college will start out his or her own independent life in debt.

While these debts are mainly caused by the high costs of college, educating children on how to find jobs, apply for scholarships and manage money would help significantly. It would also teach them how to pay off those debts efficiently after college. But why leave all the burden on parents? Why can’t our schools, our teaching institutions, help with this too?

While it has been argued that this is not a school’s job to teach practical life skills like personal finances or cooking, school takes up at least eight hours of their students’ days, more than enough time to add a few life lessons. Both parents work full time in many families and therefore have less time; they are less able to teach their children these valuable skills than in an era when only one parent worked.

School is meant to give students their best chances at success. It used to teach not only textbook subjects, but also everyday skills like car repair and cooking. Nowadays, though, in the frenzy to make every class Honor or AP, more practical classes have disappeared from the curriculum Bring them back and add money skills to the list and students would be much more prepared for the real world.

In fact, I would make financial management a mandatory class or perhaps part of a class like Economics. I am sure that most parents would want to be reassured that their children will be prepared to lead an independent life and understand basic finances.

That way, we’ll one day be able to not second-guess every purchase because we’re worried about whether we’ve paid our bills. We will be able to receive a check without giving it a blank look because we don’t know how to cash it. After all, I want to be successful outside of the Saratoga bubble, and I am sure that every other student would like to be too.