High school students should have a course in personal finance.

I know this sounds boring, but with so many young people getting in over their heads these days with credit card debt and houses they bought that they can't afford to pay for, the need is more urgent than ever. Let's all learn about how to manage our money, and the younger the better.


There used to be a course in high schools called Consumer Math. I never took it, and not many friends I had did, either. It was all about how to manage your money. At sixteen or so, I had no money, so it seemed irrelevant. Later on, when I was in my twenties, with a wife and debts, it came back to me with a wham! Once I'd had a car re-possessed and was on food stamps, I was thinking that maybe it would have been a good idea to have taken a course like that.

Nowadays such a course, offered in college but maybe not anymore in high school, is called Personal Finance. But it's required of no one, and relatively few students take it. That's a shame, as college students are even closer than high school students to actually being out there in the world, earning paychecks, faced with the realities of how to manage their money. I think it's kind of shocking that we turn out high school and even college graduates who have never had a single course in how to manage their earnings. What a disservice we are doing to them!

Will a course in managing your money keep you from making stupid mistakes? Charging too much on your credit cards? Buying a house you can't afford? Of course not. But once you've learned the principles of personal finance, they become part of your thinking, and if you get into trouble later on, you really have only yourself to blame because you knew better.

Think about sex education, as taught in our public schools. Does a course in how your reproductive system works and how to prevent pregnancy and/or avoid sexually-transmitted diseases somehow make you more responsible? No. But if you've had the course and it happens to you -- if you get a disease or if you get pregnant or get someone pregnant-- who's to blame? You. Because you knew. You'd been taught. It should have become part of your thinking, part of who you were. If you ignored what you'd been taught, that was a conscious choice on your part. Again, you knew better.

Let's suppose you take a course, in high school or college, in nutrition. You learn all about which foods make you healthier and stronger and which taste good but make you fat and maybe more prone to heart problems in later life. What you do with that knowledge is up to you. If you still drive through McDonald's three nights a week and chow down on quarter-pounders and those admittedly tasty fries, that's your decision -- but you're making that decision in direct contradiction of what you know about various kinds of food and their impact on your health and body composition. In other words, you know better, but you decide to go against the knowledge you have. Who's to blame when you get fat? You.

Back to Consumer Math: Once you've learned the basics of opening a checking account and the rules of credit and loans, etc., and the consequences of violating those rules and basics, it's up to you whether you play by the rules or ignore them. You've been taught. You've been warned. That course you took, like it or not, is part of your thinking. Or should be.

And that, I think, is the value of such courses. Make it a part of each student's thinking, part of who he/she will become as an adult. Of course some will ignore what they've learned, just as they ignore good advice from parents and others, but some will take it all to heart and become responsible citizens, never going hopelessly into debt, causing themselves and their families endless grief. One course like this can probably save at least half of our kids from becoming homeless, because half of the kids who take the course will pay attention and apply what they've learned to their own future lives. The other half we'll be seeing on the welfare rosters.

It seems to me that, as a society, we should school our children in basic personal finance. As a society, we'll reap the benefits down the line. And so will they.