More groups should help teach personal finance skills to college students

I’ve been with Young Money for almost six years and it still amazes me that there are almost no national organizations devoted to teaching personal finance education for college students. There are lots of great financial literacy groups out there with programs targeting the K-12 audience such as the Jump$tart Coalition, National Council on Economic Education, Junior Achievement and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. However, there are virtually no national college-oriented financial education programs other than Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) and the National Financial Educators (NFE).

Young Money helps sponsor both those groups and I think they do an excellent job. But many students still have never heard of SIFE even though they are a worldwide organization. NFE is another great group but they only reach a limited number of college campuses. It still seems like colleges expect for students to know all about personal finance by the time they get to campus and we know that’s far from the case. Only a few high schools actually teach basic personal finance classes to students and most parents do a lousy job of teaching money management skills to their teens before sending them off to college. So is it any surprise so many students wind up getting into credit card debt?

I’m not really sure why the federal government and school officials don’t make a larger effort to help college students learn about money issues. You can’t just throw a few pamphlets at students and expect them to figure it out overnight. I get over 100 personal finance books in the mail every year but I hardly promote any of them because I’ve learned that most students think they’re too boring to read.

If you want students to learn about finance, then you’ve got to make it more fun for them. That’s what we’re trying to do with Young Money. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I know that the students we do reach are always grateful for our help in getting their finances under control. I just wish other groups would step up and join us so we could help a lot more students.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 3:37 pm by Daniel and is filed under Students, Credit Cards and Debt, YOUNG MONEY magazine.

Tags: young adult, personal finance, financial literacy, college student, university student, financial education, college campus