In a society that largely revolves around money, long-term success depends in part on financial smarts such as how to save, how to invest and how to pay taxes. Financial illiteracy shows up in adults who don’t understand the loans they take on or fail to ever save money for retirements. 

One skill that is especially applicable for fresh graduates is learning how to navigate the student loan system, a pothole of abusive collection tactics and misinformation.

People's misunderstanding of the system has contributed to a total of over $1.4 trillion owed in student loan debt in the U.S. alone, according to The Federal Reserve Bank of New York.  

With an integrated financial literacy curriculum, students would learn about the various types of student loans, the dangers of being delinquent or defaulting on debt and common tactics used by private loan collection agencies to take advantage of students, allowing them to better handle their loans.

Even after college, fundamental awareness of finances continues to be useful like learning budgeting skills — such as understanding how Annual Percentage Rate works, figuring out how to differentiate between credit cards and learning the right way to compare two loans. 

However, half of all Americans don’t even set a monthly budget for themselves, let alone stick to it, and a concerning 54 percent are spending more than they earn each month, according to a Pew study.

So many skills go into budgeting, something that sounds so simple, and a fundamental misunderstanding of these requisite skills is likely what causes this lack of budget management.

A financial literacy class could also teach students how to allocate money for retirement by explaining 401k, the rule of 72, mutual funds and how to evaluate companies by analyzing balance sheets and income statements. 

Nearly half of all Americans do not expect to have enough money to retire properly, with over 30 percent of the U.S. population having no money reserved for retirement, according to Northwestern Mutual’s Planning and Progress Study. Schools should make it a priority to teach students the value of this kind of planning.

Just as the school has useful courses like Drivers Education, the school should introduce financial literacy as a semester-long, if not year-long, course. Or, at the very least, a financial literacy elective should be added. In the meantime, it could be a topic of the new advisory period on Wednesdays.

For 30 minutes each Wednesday, students go through modules that help them learn about community, mental health and more. It would make sense to add basic finances to the list.

Another way to teach financial literacy into the curriculum is to incorporate it to a great extent into existing classes like Health or Economics. For example, Economics teaches students how economic markets work around the world, but they can also teach students how to manage their personal finances.

With the addition of financial literacy in the classroom, students will not only leave high school with Common Core skills, but also with the fundamental financial knowledge that will help them live out their lives to the fullest and be able to retire securely when they are old and gray.