Eighteen states now require personal finance classes, educating approximately 40% of students at public high schools in the U.S. about the basics, CNBC reports.

That’s up markedly from 23% in 2022, according to nonprofit curriculum provider Next Gen Personal Finance.

Most of the classes being taught focus on giving young people personal finance primers to make sound financial decisions. The National Council for Economic Education recommends a personal finance curriculum covers six critical topic areas:
 

• Earning income
• Spending
• Saving
• Investing
• Managing credit
• Managing risk

Yanley Espinal, director of educational outreach at Next Gen Personal Finance, believes high schools that take up the personal finance mantle should be confident that their students can understand a myriad of financial topics, and go all-in to offer comprehensive classes.

In order for a personal finance course “to be comprehensive, actionable and relevant, it has to include everything—banking, budgeting, investing, taxes, insurance, paying for college, credit scores,” Espinal says. “There’s no way that you can do all of that in just a couple of weeks.”

Chris Cannon, chief program officer at the Georgia Council on Economic Education, adds: “The biggest single theme by far is decision making—weighing costs, benefits, marginal costs, marginal benefits and thinking through future consequences as best you can. That theme is really a theme of the economics discipline, and we view personal finance as an extension of economics.”

Once those basics are covered, educators can then delve into such details as understanding the power of compound interest and the downside of adjustable-rate loans, Cannon and Espinal say.

The challenge, of course, is making topics that are not top-of-mind to 16- and 17-year-olds, let alone middle schoolers, relatable, says Scott Wolla, economic education officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

One way of doing that is putting the topics in the context of subjects and goals that are relevant to a young person, Wolla suggests.

Younger members of Gen Z, for instance, care about getting into college and climate change.

Perhaps most significantly, they are ambitious, money-driven and love to save, so those are excellent jumping-off points for financial wellness classes tailored for this demographic.

They're also big users of TikTok, Instagram and other social media. They enjoy the thrill of travel and are better educated than generations that came before them. They also share many of the traits of Millennials, such as more of a trust in government than in individuals.

Certainly, a personal finance curriculum geared for the younger set can integrate these and other suitable topics.

As Wolla puts it, “Everyone makes decisions every day, and many of those decisions are financial decisions.”