Why Financial Literacy Belongs in Every High School

I learned how money works in the first grade.

That is not a typo, and it is not a brag. I grew up in Bronzeville, on Chicago's South Side, and I went to Ariel Community Academy, one of the few schools in the country that taught financial literacy starting in first grade. So while a lot of kids were memorizing multiplication tables and nothing else, my classmates and I were also learning what a share of stock was, what it meant to save, and why a dollar today could become more than a dollar later. By the time I earned a Finance degree at the University of Illinois and took my first job as a Credit Analyst at CIBC, the fundamentals were second nature. I did not have to unlearn a decade of money mistakes because I never made most of them.

Here is the thing that has bothered me ever since. The only reason I got that head start is that I happened to attend the one school that decided to teach it. That is not a strategy. That is luck. And a country should not run its financial future on luck.

So let me make the case plainly. Financial literacy belongs in every high school, as a requirement, not an elective, and not a hope that families will cover it at home. Below is why, the evidence behind it, and the honest objections answered.

Why does financial literacy belong in schools and not just at home?

Because "learn it at home" only works if your home happens to know. Money knowledge is not evenly distributed, and expecting families to transmit skills many of them were never taught themselves just passes the gap down another generation. School is the one place we can reach every student regardless of what their parents know, earn, or had the chance to learn.

We already accept this logic everywhere else. We do not tell kids to pick up reading, biology, or civics on their own time. We teach those subjects in school precisely because they are too important to leave to chance. Money is not less important than any of them. Nearly every graduate will, within a few years, sign a lease, take on a loan, get a paycheck with mystifying deductions, and decide whether to save for a future they can barely picture. We send them into all of that and hope they figure it out. That is the strange part. We treat the one subject every single student will use as the one subject we can skip.

What does financial illiteracy actually cost?

It costs real money, every year, per person. In 2025, U.S. adults lost an average of $948 apiece to a lack of financial knowledge, according to the National Financial Educators Council's annual survey (NFEC, 2025). Multiply that across a population and the gap stops looking like a personal shortcoming and starts looking like a national tax on not knowing.

The knowledge itself is thin, and it is thinnest exactly where we should worry most. On the TIAA Institute-GFLEC Personal Finance Index, U.S. adults on average answer only 47% of basic personal-finance questions correctly, the lowest result in the index's 10-year history. Gen Z answers just 38%, the lowest score of any generation measured (TIAA Institute-GFLEC, 2026). These are the young adults we just handed the keys to credit cards, student loans, and a first apartment. The generation with the least knowledge is the one making the highest-stakes first moves.

The case at a glance

Here is the argument, the evidence, and where it comes from, one row at a time.

Why high school, specifically?

Because high school is the last moment we have every student in one room right before the money decisions get real, and because the habits and the math both reward starting early.

The timing is not sentimental, it is practical. The research is unusually clear on this point. When Montana State economists Carly Urban and Christiana Stoddard studied students in states that required personal finance courses, they found that these students borrowed smarter for college, leaning about $1,300 less on expensive private loans, and that mandated financial education went on to raise young adults' credit scores and reduce severe delinquencies (NEFE, summarizing Urban and Stoddard). A course taken at 17 was still paying off years into adulthood.

There is also the plain arithmetic of compounding, which rewards the early far more than the diligent-but-late. A student who understands at 16 why time in the market beats timing the market has decades to let that one idea work. A student who learns it at 40 has already missed the most valuable years. We teach a lot of things in high school that students may never touch again. This is the opposite. This is the subject whose value grows the longer they hold it.

Answering the honest objections

I have made this case to enough principals and school boards to know the pushback by heart. It deserves real answers, not a founder waving it away.

"There is no room in the schedule." True, schedules are brutal and every section is contested. But the same research that shows mandates work also shows why the requirement matters: when the course is optional, the students who most need it are the least likely to choose it, and the measurable benefits disappear. A requirement is not bureaucratic rigidity. It is the mechanism that actually reaches the kid who would never have signed up.

"Kids won't care about money math." They already care about money. What they have never had is a way to touch it. When students manage something real instead of reading about it, the disengagement evaporates. I have watched it happen.

"It's already covered inside our econ or math course." Sometimes, a little. But embedding a few money lessons inside another subject is not the same as teaching the subject, and the outcomes bear that out: NGPF counts 30 states with a standalone requirement precisely because integrated coverage has not reliably moved graduates' financial behavior (NGPF, 2026). When a subject is everyone's job, it tends to become no one's.

What "taught well" looks like

Making it a requirement is step one. Making it stick is step two, and this is the part I have spent the last several years on. A required course taught from a worksheet can technically satisfy a mandate and still leave students bored and no better off. The knowledge has to become experience.

That belief is the whole reason we built Rapunzl. We started in a single Chicago high school in 2018 with a simple idea: let students learn money by doing money. Rapunzl pairs a standards-aligned curriculum with a real-time investment simulator, so students manage a simulated portfolio priced on live market data. When the market moves during seventh period, their portfolios move too, and suddenly the news matters because it is affecting their money. The proof is in the scores. Students walk into Rapunzl programs averaging 34% on financial literacy assessments and walk out averaging 93%. Since 2018, Rapunzl has reached more than 150,000 students. That is what happens when a subject stops being a lecture and starts being something students actually do.

None of that replaces the core argument. It reinforces it. The reason to require financial literacy is that it works, and it works best when it is real.

The bottom line

I got my head start because one school in Bronzeville decided every first-grader deserved to understand money. No student's financial future should depend on that kind of luck. The evidence is in, the cost of skipping it is measured in real dollars, and the states requiring it are proving the model at scale. Every high school in the country can do this, and every student who walks the stage deserves to do it knowing how money actually works. That is not a nice-to-have. That is the whole point of an education that claims to prepare people for their lives.

By Myles Gage, Co-Founder and CMO of Rapunzl.